Help Center · Glossary

Reading the Buy Box timeline

Last updated: 30 September 2026

The timeline shows who held the Buy Box as continuous intervals: gains, losses, rotations, suppressions. It reads like a possession chart, not a price chart.

The timeline turns the raw history into intervals of possession: this seller held the Buy Box from here to there, then it changed hands. Five kinds of movement exist: a gain, when the Buy Box enters your side; a loss, when it leaves it; a rotation, when it changes hands within the same side; a suppression, when Amazon shows no default seller; and a restoration, when the Buy Box comes back.

Two reading habits help. Width is what matters: a long quiet interval says more about your position than a burst of short flips, and shares are computed from these durations. And the boundary between colors is a real event with a timestamp: hovering or clicking gives you when it happened and who took over, which is usually the start of the explanation.

When the holder could not be identified for a stretch, the timeline shows it as unknown rather than guessing. Unknown time is left out of your share and shown next to it: it is not counted as a loss. A loss that crosses an unknown stretch is read against the last holder we did identify.