What Is a Fast Track Score for Amazon Vendors, and How Can I Improve It?
As an Amazon vendor, you're always looking for a way to boost your conversion rate. There are many different approaches to doing this, but one key opportunity some vendors may not be aware of is boosting what is known as a "Fast Track" score.
Boosting a product's Fast Track score will have a dramatic impact on a product's conversion rate, so every Amazon vendor should understand this metric and ways to improve it. This guide breaks down what it is and what steps you can take right now to increase your score.
Screenshot from the Amazon.com website.
What Is Fast Track on Amazon?
A vendor’s Fast Track score is a measurement of what percentage of customers will see an Amazon vendor's item listed as "Prime Eligible" with a strong delivery promise: Amazon will deliver the product for free on a specific day if you place your order in a specific timeframe. This improves the conversion rate for that product. The higher a product's Fast Track score, the more often customers shopping on Amazon will see that product listed as Prime Eligible, which means it qualifies for free two-day shipping for Amazon Prime members.
Why Is a Strong Fast Track Score Important to Amazon Vendors?
A strong Fast Track score is important to Amazon vendors because it means the product will be listed as Prime Eligible more often, which will increase the conversion rate and therefore the total sales of the product. Amazon Prime members will be more willing to pull the trigger and buy your product if they get free two-day shipping for obvious reasons.
But will the return on investment for a good Fast Track score be worth expending time, effort, and money to boost it? The answer is “yes” over the long run, but it's going to be difficult to attribute individual actions to improvements in Fast Track score because Amazon doesn’t like to reveal its internal processes and thus doesn’t provide much in the way of data. So you can be confident that your Fast Track score will improve at some point if you make certain adjustments, but you won't have much data you can point to that will prove that.
You can find the data Amazon does provide within the Traffic Diagnostic report. There are two data points you should key in on: your conversion rate when a product is listed as Fast Track and when it is not, and the Fast Track Glance View metric.
What Is a Fast Track Glance View?
Fast Track Glance View is the percentage of times an Amazon customer clicked on a product's detail page (also known as a glance view) when that product was listed as a Fast Track item. This metric is important because, while it didn't result in a sale, a glance view is considered a strong indication of interest in the product.
Why is it important for a vendor? It's simply an additional metric to show how customers are responding to a product's Fast Track listing. Rather than relying on just the conversion rate to tell you if boosting a product’s Fast Track score is worth it, you might want to see another metric showing how customers are responding to a product's Fast Track listing (especially if the conversion rate doesn't have a high enough sample size for you to draw conclusions).
So, for example, if the conversion rate is fairly weak at first but you're showing a large amount of customers clicking on the product page through the Fast Track Glance View metric, you might decide that's ample reason to ramp up efforts to boost your Fast Track score further in the hopes that conversions will soon follow.
How Can an Amazon Vendor Improve Their Fast Track Score?
An Amazon vendor can improve their Fast Track score by (1) avoiding going out of stock, (2) keeping demand strong, (3) winning the Buy Box, (4) minimizing operational defects, and (5) ensuring that the product is as “shippable” as possible. Out of all of these things, stocking is probably the No. 1 factor that contributes to Fast Track.
And it's not just about whether a product is in stock, it's about where it is in stock. Amazon needs to be highly confident the product can reach the customer within the promised two days, and so it needs to be located in a fulfillment center that can actually deliver those results. Sometimes, Amazon even promises a customer delivery within hours if they order within a certain time frame — a promise they can make only because they know that the product is located in a warehouse very close to the customer.
Obviously, there's only so much you can do about that. After all, if your product is in a warehouse in New York, and a customer from California is shopping for it, Amazon probably won't promise that two-day turnaround. Also, some fulfillment centers may only handle certain types of products, like apparel or electronics, or even certain sizes of products.
But while there's no direct lever you can pull to improve this situation (and Amazon likes to keep details about the inner workings of its Fast Track score internal) you can make some changes to how your business is run to increase your odds of getting a better score.
Here are a few things you should be doing:
Avoid going out of stock. If you're running out of a product often, Amazon will not list it as Prime Eligible. Amazon wants to be sure that when a customer places an order and they offer two-day shipping, you'll be able to fill that order in a timely manner.
Keep demand for the product strong. Make sure the product sells well and consistently, so consider juicing demand with ads so that Amazon orders more of it and puts it in more fulfillment centers (thus raising the likelihood your product will get promoted through Fast Track).
Be really, really good at winning the Buy Box. Make sure Amazon is getting a strong margin on your products, allowing them to price the product more aggressively. Anything you can do to increase your margins is going to help Fast Track long term.
Make sure the product is in excellent condition. Amazon has strict rules about the condition of the product, so if your product often has problems like scuffs or physical imperfections, has missing or broken seals, comes in the wrong size or color, or has any other problems that prompt Amazon to review it, this creates delays and will make your product ineligible for Prime. The best thing you can do is constantly monitor defect and chargeback reports for the product and identify recurring issues and fix them so they don’t keep recurring. Download your Vendor Central product catalog and make sure everything is accurate. This has the added benefit of reducing chargebacks and saving you money.
Focus on products that are easy to ship. It's easy to quickly ship and make money on a product when it is small, compact, and not oddly shaped. If you have products that fit neatly into a small, square box, you may have an easier time boosting your Fast Track score than if you sold bicycles, for example. So if you're a bicycle shop, you may have more success if you focus less on boosting the bikes for Fast Track and focus more on the parts.
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