Ever since Amazon shifted to regional fulfillment in 2023, a steady national in-stock rate can often mask the regional markets where a brand is losing customers.
Say a shopper in Phoenix finds a product with next-day delivery, but a shopper in Charlotte sees the same product as unavailable. When averaged into one national number, Charlotte's stockout goes unseen, so no extra inventory is sent. In other cases, shipping costs may make the first-party offer unprofitable, causing Amazon to suppress it. Or the first-party offer may lose the Buy Box to a third-party seller that can fulfill the order more profitably. Ultimately, ad spend keeps going toward a product shoppers can't buy locally. These losses add up, region by region, until they finally reduce national sales, long after a brand could have fixed them.
To get ahead, brands need visibility into availability, lost Buy Box, shipping speed, and suppression across representative ZIP codes, rather than relying on a national average that hides those signals. That way, they can identify the markets they're losing while there's still time to act.
What national-level tracking misses in a regional model
National tracking rolls all regions into a single national figure, creating a blind spot that becomes more consequential as profitability varies from market to market based on local fulfillment costs and shipping distances.
When fulfillment costs climb too high, Amazon flags the product with a CRaP (Cannot Realize a Profit) designation and stops showing it there, so it disappears for those shoppers while the national number holds steady. This is especially true for remote markets like Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, where surcharges can reach 100% of the base fulfillment cost for standard parcels and up to 200% for large items. While those are extreme cases, some version of the same local profitability equation affects distribution for most brands. Without regional data, brands can't identify where these losses are occurring or how costs vary by fulfillment center, making it difficult to work with Amazon to resolve the underlying operational issues.
How regional visibility changes the way brands compete on Amazon
When brands can see performance at the regional level, they can make decisions based on what shoppers in specific markets are actually experiencing.
A lost Buy Box becomes a fulfillment fix
Brands can see where they're still losing the Buy Box and why. The assumption is typically that there's a pricing problem, which can inspire brands to offer nationwide discounts.
But regional data can reveal that the problem is isolated to a specific market, which won't be resolved by lowering prices everywhere. Instead, brands can identify and restore inventory in the region where the Buy Box was lost.
Brands negotiate with Amazon from their own data
With those fixes in place, regional data also gives brands more leverage in conversations with Amazon. Under the Vendor Central model, Amazon controls pricing and determines which inventory to reorder, meaning brands often trade control for scale and lose sight of their own margins.
Now brands can shift the dynamic: instead of relying on Amazon's broad claims that sales are down, retailers can point to specific fulfillment issues. That turns communication with a vendor manager from a vague "our sales are down" discussion to a "your Southeast node has been below 80% availability for six weeks on our top three SKUs, and here's what it's costing both of us" conversation.
Brands tracking by region are taking share from those that don't
To compete on Amazon today, brands need the same regional view of availability that their shoppers in each respective market have. Regional performance tracking helps brands identify where they're losing customers before it's too late to correct issues and protect market share.
CommerceIQ's Location Based Analytics scores every market based on the signals that determine whether a product will be found and purchased, enabling brands to:
- Track product availability, competitive positioning, and compliance down to the zip code.
- Flag and resolve localized stockouts and pricing gaps before they harm regional sales metrics.
- Monitor third-party sellers, in-store availability, and promotions relative to competitors within specific geographic and retail domains.
- Leverage regional shelf data to fine-tune and target retail media spend toward regions with optimal fulfillment.
Performance can be analyzed by region, area, market, brand, or category, helping brands to pinpoint emerging digital shelf issues long before they can affect national results.
