Managing Competitor Suppression Strategies on Amazon

"Should we launch a cheaper sub-brand to compete with our knockoffs on Amazon?" This is what a brand founder asked me on a call recently. His situation: Premium product. $200+ price point. Lifetime warranty. Superior materials. But Amazon is flooded with $50-$80 knockoffs using thinner, cheaper specs with no warranty. He's watching his own customers — people HE educated through years of mass media, search Amazon and buy the cheap version. So the idea is simple: Launch a fighter brand. Same supply chain. Same manufacturer. Same quality control. But limited SKUs. Limited specs. Price point that goes toe-to-toe with the knockoffs. Sounds smart. But here's where it gets complicated. The risks of a fighter brand: Cannibalization. Your $200 customer sees your $99 option and trades down. You just lost $100 in margin on a customer who would've paid full price. Brand confusion. If the sub-brand is too close to the parent, you dilute the premium positioning you spent years building. Operational drag. Now you're managing two brands, two listings, two ad strategies, two sets of inventory. That's not free. The case FOR a fighter brand: - You're already losing those customers to knockoffs. At least capture them with your own product. - You control the quality. A $99 product with your 6mm specs still beats their 4mm at the same price. - You take up more real estate in search results. Two brands means two listings on page one. - You protect the premium line by giving price-sensitive shoppers somewhere to go that isn't a competitor. Here's how I'd think about it: If your premium product conversion rate is strong and the issue is just traffic, don't launch a fighter brand. Fix your ads and listing first. But if you're losing conversions at the point of comparison? That's different. The customer is ON your page. They see the price. They bounce to a knockoff. That's when a fighter brand makes sense. The key: the fighter brand has to be far enough from the parent that it doesn't cannibalize, but close enough that it leverages your supply chain advantage. Same factory. Different brand story. Different price tier. Different customer. If you can thread that needle, you're not competing with your knockoffs anymore. You're replacing them. Curious to hear your thoughts - should they launch a challenger brand? Which companies have done this successfully?

How do you win when your product costs 4x more than competitors? I faced this exact challenge with a client last month. Their product: Premium lumbar support selling for $120. The competition: Basic back supports at $20-40. Sales stuck at 5 units per week when they needed 20. "Maybe we should just give up and start over," they said. But I knew the problem wasn't the product. It was the positioning strategy. They were fighting a price war they could never win. Here's what changed everything: We stopped competing where everyone else was competing. Instead of targeting "back support" (dominated by $20 products), we targeted "high-quality lumbar support." Instead of generic product terms, we targeted specific pain points. The strategy: • Find low-volume, high-intent keywords where quality matters more than price • Target people actively seeking solutions, not just products • Position against the problem, not against competitors The results: Within 60 days, we were ranking #1 for multiple quality-focused terms. Sales increased from 5 to 18 units per week. ACoS improved by 40%. The framework: → Pain-point targeting: Focus on what the product solves → Quality modifiers: Add "professional," "medical-grade," "therapeutic" → Long-tail dominance: Win 10 keywords with 200 searches vs fighting for 1 keyword with 5,000 → Buyer intent matching: Target people researching solutions The key insight? Premium products shouldn't compete on the same battlefield as budget alternatives. They should create their own battlefield where quality matters more than price. I'm the founder of GigaBrands.ai, helping Amazon brands develop positioning strategies that command higher prices. Your move: • Research long-tail keywords with quality modifiers • Target specific pain points vs generic categories • Focus on buyer intent, not search volume What's your biggest challenge positioning premium products against budget competitors?

After 10 years selling on Amazon and managing $200M+ for brands, I've learned one crucial truth: The biggest mistake DTC brands make is treating Amazon like an afterthought. Here's why that's costing you millions: When you spend heavily on Meta ads, a spillover effect happens. People see your ad, get interested, but then go to Amazon to buy (because that's where they prefer to shop). If you're not there, guess who gets that sale? Your competitors. They're literally making money from YOUR ad dollars. Even worse — they're bidding on your brand name keywords. I see this every day with Ridge Wallets. There's an entire economy of people bidding on "Ridge wallet" search terms. The solution isn't complicated, but it requires expertise: → Capture at least 80% market share for your branded search terms → Track your most important keywords daily → Understand your conversion rate vs. the market average → Leverage Amazon's data (especially Search Query Performance Report) → Run deals strategically throughout the year Amazon is a bottom-of-funnel channel. People aren't browsing — they're shopping with specific search queries and ready to buy. Your job is to rank at the top for those queries and convert at a higher rate than competitors. This isn't theory. I've used these exact strategies to help brands add 10, 20 to up to 30% to their yearly revenue through Amazon alone. What's your biggest challenge with Amazon right now?

The majority of Amazon sales go through the Buy Box. Lose it (even for a day) and your top-performing ASIN can flatline without warning or explanation. That’s exactly what happened to one of our clients last month. Their category-leading product, responsible for a significant share of their monthly revenue, suddenly stopped converting.  No suppression. No alerts. Just a sharp, unexpected drop in sales velocity that didn’t show up in any performance notifications. On the surface, everything looked fine: • Healthy inventory • Strong reviews • Consistent sales velocity • No recent changes to content or pricing in Seller Central Yet something had clearly broken. And it wasn’t visible from the front end. The root cause? Amazon’s Competitive Pricing Threshold, one of Amazon’s most misunderstood triggers. This is an internal, algorithmic rule that evaluates your offer not only within Amazon but across external marketplaces where your product (or even a comparable one) is being sold. Here’s the core logic: If your product is listed on Amazon at $20, but Amazon detects a similar listing for $15 on any other marketplace or your DTC site, it flags your offer as overpriced relative to the broader market. And when that happens, Amazon doesn’t suppress the listing. It simply revokes Buy Box eligibility. From the customer’s perspective, the listing looks live. From the seller’s perspective, traffic might still appear steady. But conversions disappear, and nothing in Seller Central tells you why. While the impact is easy to see in the numbers, the cause was buried deep in Amazon’s internal logic. To solve this, we appealed through Seller Support, not just with an explanation, but with an idea in mind: Gathered screenshots for evidence of competitive listings and the same products on other marketplaces A case showing that the “external” price was for a different item, bundled differently A direct request for review by the internal Pricing team The outcome: Buy Box reinstated. Listing performance normalized. Time to resolution: 3 days, two escalations, and a clear narrative backed by evidence. The lesson here is strategic. Amazon doesn’t think in terms of SKUs, it thinks in terms of ecosystems. It compares prices not by what you intended, but by what it detects. And when that detection flags you as non-competitive, the penalty isn’t loud or obvious. It’s silent and persistent. So, what can you do? • Monitor your external listings regularly • When listing bundles or variations, make sure the distinction is clear • If flagged, don’t just lower your price, question the comparison • Prepare to appeal with real context and evidence Because losing the Buy Box isn’t just a sales problem, it’s often a visibility one rooted in how Amazon sees your competitiveness. #AmazonSellers #MarketplaceOperations #BuyBoxStrategy #OnlineSellerSolutions

If you're selling on Amazon, you know that Vendor Managers will often suppress your offer in the Buy Box when asking for margin support. It's a punitive action to ensure vendors respond to Amazon's investment requests. Which raises the question: ✋ Should you ignore Amazon's request for cost support? 💰 Or should you open your wallet instead? The answer depends on three main factors: 𝟭- 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝗻-𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝗶𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 When listings get suppressed, time is money. The first thing your teams need to understand is whether the loss of profitability is caused by a structural or a non-structural margin dilution. Structural margin dilution refers to the permanent decline of your product's average selling price or other effects that lead to a lasting profitability impact. In those cases, investing in better cost prices or ASIN-specific cost support agreements can help get the product back on track. Non-structural margin dilution refers to effects that lead to a temporary profitability decline in Amazon's Net PPM. In these cases, you may not want to change the product's cost price as a permanent fix to a temporary margin challenge. Instead, you can get the product back live by negotiating a time-limited, ASIN-specific cost support, or by making Amazon part of your rotating promotion strategy with other retailers. 𝟮- 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Not every product contributes equally to your sales and margin performance with Amazon. Buy Box suppressions won't threaten your sales targets if applied to your long-tail portfolio. As a result, it's often better to ignore margin support requests from Amazon unless they affect your mid- and top-selling ASINs. However, if Vendor Managers apply Buy Box suppressions on your #1 listing, you may want to escalate this conversation across both organisations to limit the negative impact on your account. 𝟯- 𝗔𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 As with any negotiation tactic, Buy Box suppressions are only effective when vendors have no alternative to selling to Amazon. This means that working with a 3P or having your own 3P account can give you the flexibility to recoup otherwise lost Amazon 1P sales through Seller Central. This secures your sales rank and ensures that your teams can weaken Amazon's leverage in negotiations for margin support. --- How are you dealing with margin compensation requests from Vendor Managers? Let me know in the comments! #amazonvendor #amazonstrategy

Amazon Sellers: Tired of seeing competitor ads all over your own product pages? Most sellers see Virtual Bundles primarily as a way to increase Average Order Value. They're not wrong, but they're missing the bigger strategic play. The primary benefit of a Virtual Bundle isn't always the sale, it's the free real estate. It's a powerful defensive tool that shoves competitor ads down the page, keeping customers focused on your brand. Here’s the framework for using them effectively: The Defensive Play: A Virtual Bundle takes up a massive chunk of your product detail page. This physically pushes competitor Sponsored Product ads further down, reducing the odds of a customer clicking away from your listing. The Offensive Play: Use your Brand Analytics report to identify which of your products are "frequently bought together." Create logical bundles based on that data to create an offer that is genuinely valuable and easy for a customer to add to their cart. The No-Risk Factor: This is the best part. If a bundle happens to get a bad review, you can just delete it and create a new one. Since the inventory isn't physically bundled, there’s zero risk or long-term commitment. At best, you increase your average order value. At worst, you take up more space on your own listing for free. We broke down this tactic on the pod this past week (and 11 other free Amazon features that most brands aren't using!) Go find it wherever you listen to your podcasts.

A competitor filed a fake intellectual property complaint against your listing. Amazon took it down within hours. You didn't copy anyone's design. You didn't steal anyone's trademark. You didn't do a single thing wrong. And your listing is gone. This is one of the most aggressive black hat tactics in the Amazon ecosystem, and most sellers don't know it exists until it happens to them. The way it works is simple. A competitor files a bogus IP infringement claim through Amazon's reporting system. Amazon, erring on the side of caution, takes the listing down while it investigates. That investigation can take days. Sometimes weeks. And every day your listing is down, your sales are zero, your BSR is tanking, and your ad campaigns are burning budget on a product nobody can buy. By the time Amazon reviews the claim and realizes it was fraudulent, the damage is done. Your ranking has dropped. Your conversion momentum is gone. And the competitor who filed the complaint? They picked up your sales while you were offline. The sellers who recover from this quickly are the ones who document everything from the start. Screenshots of the claim. Records of your own IP filings. Evidence that your product predates the complaint. All of it submitted to Amazon immediately, not after you spend three days panicking. If you're enrolled in Brand Registry, use it. File your counter-notice through the brand protection tools. Escalate to the Abuse Prevention team if the standard support channels aren't moving fast enough. And if it keeps happening (if the same competitor or account keeps filing false claims)consider getting legal counsel involved. Amazon takes repeat false filers seriously, but sometimes you have to push the issue. The best defense is knowing this tactic exists before it hits you. Most sellers learn about it the hard way. Follow me for more on protecting your Amazon business from things you didn't know could hurt it.

I recently wrapped a short-term project with a well-known brand that was making a costly mistake on Amazon. They were obsessing over big-name competitors while completely ignoring their biggest threat. This is a pattern I see frequently when auditing large brand accounts. Problem: Not growing organic rank Large brands burn budget defending against household names. → Completely missing the real battle happening right under their noses. → Bidding aggressively on competitor branded terms. → Over-investing in their own brand defense. Their spend wasn’t working hard for them because these tactics do not grow organic rank! The real threat: Chinese no-name competitors While big brands are focused on the wrong fight, Chinese competitor products are quietly dominating non-branded search terms. When I searched "steamer for clothes" (not their branded terms), the no-name Chinese brands with lower prices were flying. Why does this happen to big brands: → Most established brands think like traditional marketers. → They focus on brand protection and competitor defense. → But Amazon isn't about brand loyalty. → You have to win the search result. My approach to combat this: → Focus budget on owning non-branded, high-intent search terms. → Let organic handle most brand defense. → Treat Chinese sellers as the primary competitive threat. In 2025, the Amazon battlefield isn’t brand vs brand. It’s recognisable names vs relentless operators. --- Hi I’m Chad 👋 Follow me for tips on profitably scaling your brand on Amazon.