What is Amazon’s Choice and how are products chosen?

Amazon’s Choice is a popular feature on the marketplace. Sellers are keen to get this badge and hopefully make improved sales.

But what is Amazon’s Choice and how is it determined? It’s basically Amazon’s recommendation of what to buy. Especially related to Prime items it was first designed as a service for Alexa to help shoppers quickly find items to buy. It launched in 2015, to promote highly rated, well-priced products ready to ship immediately for the most popular searches on Amazon.

But how are you actually chosen to be Amazon’s Choice? It’s not entirely clear how they are determined. But this post from Amazon in November last year at least demonstrates that it cannot be bought, even if it doesn’t cast much light on how you might amend your listings to bag it:

Amazon’s Choice is a feature that helps Amazon customers save time and effort when searching for common, everyday items and suggests highly-rated, well-priced products with Prime shipping. Amazon’s Choice is not available for all products.

Sellers don’t need to enroll or register to be considered for Amazon’s Choice – the Amazon’s Choice feature considers all highly-rated, Prime-eligible items sold or fulfilled by Amazon. It’s not possible to specifically request that your product be selected as Amazon’s Choice for a given search keyword.

Selections are constantly updated, so continuing to offer high quality, well-priced products to your customers will give you the best chance to be selected as Amazon’s Choice.
– Jessica from Amazon

It seems fair to suggest that the criteria aren’t all that tricky to predict and explain. You’ll likely need to have a top notch performance rating in general and a specifically good trackrecord on the item in particular, you’ll need to offer Prime and also be competitively priced. Aside from that it’s impossible to tell. But it would also seem likely Amazon will give prominence to their own goods.

When it comes to Amazon’s Choice, it’s probably best to take the view that trading well is the best approach to get it applied to your listings and even then it’s by no means clear that it actually will give you a significantsales boost.