- Across 261 UK listings we have tracked since April 2026, the average listing has 4.4 sellers.
- The gap between the cheapest and dearest offer on the same bottle is 16.7% at the median, and more than 20% on 44.4% of listings.
- 41% of offers are fulfilled by Amazon; the rest ship from the seller's own warehouse and rarely win the buy box.
- Only 21.5% of listings have a single seller. On the rest, your price is set by whoever is willing to go lowest.
What the buy box is, and why it decides your price
On a marketplace listing there is one "add to basket" button and, usually, several sellers behind it. The seller in the buy box gets the sale. The algorithm weighs price, fulfilment, stock and seller performance, and on drinks it leans heavily towards Amazon's own first-party offer and towards offers fulfilled from Amazon's warehouses. For a brand this has a blunt consequence: the retail price the shopper sees is the buy-box price, whoever set it. If a wholesaler, a grey importer or a cash-and-carry customer lists your bottle below your intended price, that becomes your price.
How many sellers are on your bottle
Of the 261 UK listings we price-track, the median has three sellers and the mean 4.4. One in five has a single seller; those are the listings where a brand controls its own price. Amazon is itself a seller on 84.3% of them, which is the first-party vendor route: Amazon buys stock and retails it. The remaining offers split between sellers fulfilled by Amazon (41% of all offers) and sellers shipping from their own premises.
How far prices drift
On the same listing, on the same day, the dearest offer is typically 16.7% above the cheapest. On 44.4% of listings the spread exceeds 20%. That spread is where margin leaks: the buy box follows the low offer, the low offer is usually a third party clearing stock, and the brand's recommended price stops meaning anything. The pattern we see most is a seasonal one. Prices tighten before Christmas when every seller is in stock, then widen in January when the leftovers are discounted.
What a spread costs
Put numbers on it. A 70cl gin with a recommended price of £28 and a median spread of 16.7% has a cheapest offer around £24. The buy box follows that offer, so the brand's effective shelf price is £24, and every seller who wants the buy box back has to match it. Over a month of 2,000 units, the £4 gap is £8,000 of retail value that nobody intended to give away, and it sets the price expectation for the next promotion. On the 44% of listings where the spread exceeds 20%, the same bottle is giving away £5.60 or more.
| Recommended price | Spread | Cheapest offer (sets the buy box) | Gap per bottle | Gap on 2,000 units a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £28.00 | 16.7% (median) | £24.00 | £4.00 | £8,000 |
| £28.00 | 20% | £23.33 | £4.67 | £9,340 |
| £28.00 | 30% | £21.54 | £6.46 | £12,920 |
| £35.00 | 16.7% (median) | £30.00 | £5.00 | £10,000 |
The seasonal pattern
Spreads are not constant. Through our tracking since April the pattern is the same on most listings: offers converge in the run-up to the big selling periods, because every seller is in stock and no one wants to lose the buy box at peak, then widen again in the weeks after as the sellers who over-ordered clear stock below the brand's price. January and the fortnight after Father's Day are the two moments when a brand's price is most likely to be set by someone else. The fix is boring: hold stock centrally, supply the channels that need it, and never let a wholesaler sit on a pallet they have to dump.
What we do about it
- Supply as first-party stock. When Amazon retails your bottle from stock bought from us, your listing is on the strongest footing the algorithm allows, and it is Prime-eligible by default.
- Keep a Seller offer alongside. Vendor stock runs out; a Seller offer from the same bonded pool keeps the listing live and the price where it should be.
- Watch every offer, every day. Our tracking logs each seller, price and fulfilment route on every listing we sell. A new low offer shows up in the portal before it shows up in your sales.
- Set the price from the shelf, not the spreadsheet. We agree a price with you and protect it, and you see every price in the portal. The buy price we agree with you is worked back from a retail price the category will actually hold.
How we gathered this
Shelfdrop Intelligence combines three feeds: a weekly scan of the drinks listings our brand finder tracks on each marketplace (sales rank, estimated monthly units, buy box holder, offer count, stock history), category leaderboards and weekly search volumes, and our own price-tracking of the listings we sell against, which has logged more than 420,000 offers since April 2026. Monthly unit figures are estimates and rounded. We never publish a client's own numbers. Figures are for the listings in our scans, not the whole category, so treat them as a large sample rather than a census.