Safe Buyouts on Marketplaces: Insights from an IT Team That Tested the Algorithms for 3 Years

To avoid sanctions, fines and a rollback in rankings, a buyout has to be done so that the marketplace has no questions about:

• the purchase;
• the account;
• the product.

I am writing about all marketplaces in general terms. Each has its own nuances, but there are shared rules too.

They store a hard-to-imagine volume of data: on purchases, customers and products. Automatically hunting for buyouts requires analyzing an enormous amount of data, which is expensive, loads the system and slows it down.

The marketplace's main task is to find buyouts while spending minimal resources

Back in 2023 WB looked for buyouts by the product's buyout rate. If you had a 100% buyout rate from a pickup point over a given period, you got fined. Sellers figured it out quickly and stopped doing it that way.

If marketplaces analyzed every shopper session or stored every piece of suspicious account activity, keeping that data would cost so much that no fine could ever pay it back.

That is why all the talk about "moving the mouse in a certain order", "ordering only 14 hours after adding to cart", "always opening the reviews tab" clearly comes from people who do not understand how hard it is to run an IT product.

• Payment method.
• Buyer data: IP, device, WIN, fingerprint, cookies from the marketplace and other sites.
• Purchase geography.
• Account age.
• The chosen pickup point and any change of pickup point.
• The type and history of the buyer's account.
• How often reviews are left.
• How many orders the account has made before, how "alive" it is.
• Suspicious purchase patterns.

Yes, it hurts and costs more up front, but in the end you get a guaranteed result that lasts.

Marketplaces do not much like being robbed (from their point of view). And they are ready to spend time and money on those who do it especially actively.

If you run buyouts, factor in the marketplace's motivation

When you pay the full commission and buy the product like a regular shopper, the marketplace has less appetite for hunting down your buyouts.

Saved on commissions and used rFBS? Do not be surprised when a month later you are left with 15 organic reviews on the product card.

The marketplace has already earned from every purchase you make: from you, from the commission, from the delivery.

About promo codes on Ozon

If you run buyouts for the sake of reviews using promo codes, you pay commissions, taxes and services without increasing the product's revenue, which means lost growth in positions.

Ozon treats products with promo codes with suspicion and checks exactly these buyouts first.

Buyouts do not work on Ozon. I tested it! I rented accounts and paid from my own card with a 90% promo code via DBS, and there was no growth at all.

Results vary.

Meanwhile someone else does 150 buyouts via FBO, pays the marketplace the full product price, and gets 10x order growth

From 10-15 units to 120-140 units a day. All it took was:

• adding 8 keywords to the SEO;
• using "Behavioral signals" on the product card;
• running 150 buyouts on target keywords.

The algorithms love the product and keep promoting it inside the niche, now without our help.

The simplest way to spot a buyout used to be checking the product's buyout rate. Today it is the same, only harder: checking mid-funnel conversions. Not the buyout rate, but cart-to-order rate, click-to-cart rate and CTR.

If you keep mid-funnel conversions intact, marketplaces will not raise the red flag saying "CONVERSIONS ARE SWINGING TOO MUCH, RUN A BUYOUT CHECK".

This is exactly why in 2024 WB handed out a pile of fines for buyouts driven from external traffic

Shoppers arrived who ALREADY KNEW EXACTLY that they wanted this mesh summer tunic. They retyped the SKU number, added it to the cart and bought immediately.

• External ads: 100 people came in, 80 added to cart, 55 ordered, 50 kept the item.
• A real purchase: 100 people came in, 15 added to cart, 10 ordered, 5 kept the item.

A 10x difference! The algorithms counted it as buyouts.

Assembling your own farm on SIM cards from the Sadovod market with anti-detect browsers is not enough. Algorithms keep evolving and the number of tracked parameters keeps growing.

Most players on the market (fulfillment providers, buyout sites, services with disposable SIM cards) run at 30-50% effectiveness. They all work off the same script: one-day accounts, virtual cards or SBP transfers, orders to the same pickup points.

When making the purchase you have to look like a regular shopper on EVERY parameter.

• Do not push the number of reviews far above the normal rate for your product. If people leave 1 review per 100 purchases, 100 reviews in a week will look strange.
• Leave reviews on 10% to 75% of buyouts in the first month. It depends on the niche and total sales volume.
• Do not post reviews immediately after the purchase: wait and "use" the product first.
• Write unique reviews, with no repetition.
• Do not use ChatGPT blindly when writing reviews. Better to have an editor clean up every AI-written review.

To calculate the real cost of a review:

Effective cost of a review = (Taxes + commissions + delivery + product purchase price + buyout cost + review cost) / share of reviews left / share of reviews that pass / share of reviews still live a month later

In most cases it is better to overpay a contractor 150 ₽ for a buyout via FBO than to place reviews via eDBS.

I ran buyouts with a budget of 1.5 million ₽ for buying the goods and 600 thousand ₽ for the buyout services. The reviews did not go through, we got a fine instead, and we stopped the buyouts immediately. In the end 30% of the goods were "lost". I want my 300 thousand ₽ back, and they tell me the service was rendered and they know nothing.

After a case like that we decided to build behavioral-signal promotion in-house.

Where contractors can cheat you

• The purchase price.
• Whether the service was actually performed.
• Whether the review or the buyout went through.
• Product rejections.
• Lost goods.

When the price changes 10 times a day, the service costs a fifth of the product price and the reporting is complicated, dishonest contractors often feel the urge to fulfill the order slightly in their own favor.

How to neutralize 90% of the opportunities for cheating

1. 1A contract and an officially structured relationship are the baseline. You will be able to defend your interests in court.
2. 2Transparent reporting is an inseparable part of the work. No transparent reporting means the counterparty can hide something, deliberately or out of inexperience.
3. 3Ask for the purchase receipt. No receipt means the work was not done.
4. 4Ask for the review ID or a screenshot of the review. If there is none, the work was not done.

Until clear and complete reporting on the project is delivered, the project is not closed.

About defects during buyouts

Marketplaces break, damage, mix up and lose up to 5% of goods by the time they reach the buyer (the average is 1-2%). Buyout contractors often receive goods in worse shape than anyone would like.

If you bought out 300 units and 8 are damaged and 4 could not be found, that is a standard situation.

Budget up to 5% defects for buyouts. If a contractor's losses run above 5%, it needs looking into.

Ideally you should be compensated for lost goods at cost, including delivery.

A buyout is not just a purchase, it is a mystery shopper process that mirrors every stage of a purchase by an ordinary marketplace customer: from search to receiving the item.

So you get to see and feel how customers see your product, and to understand why they do not want to keep it.

To raise the buyout rate, you need to understand the reason for refusal

• Wrong size, or the color is not what the photo showed.
• Defect.
• Poor appearance.
• Smell.
• Simply did not like it.

Case: a manufacturing defect

We found a manufacturing defect at an international cosmetics and household chemicals producer. The shower gel cap was poorly sealed across the whole batch. In transit the gel opened and leaked over its own packaging and the neighboring items as well.

About 20% of that gel's packages reached customers in unsellable condition.

We put together a report and sent it to the production site. Because the information reached the production floor quickly, they were able to change the packaging and raise the product's buyout rate from 78% to 95%.

Given the sales volumes, that small change earned more than 300 thousand ₽ within a month of the update.

How to run buyouts safely

• Marketplace algorithms keep evolving and track an ever-growing number of factors.
• Marketplaces cannot track all the data because of the need to store and analyze huge volumes. So the focus is on the main and obvious markers.
• For 100% of buyouts and reviews to go through, the marketplace must have no questions about the product, the review, the account or the purchase.
• If positions on your keywords do not rise after the goods are collected, the buyouts did not go through.
• IMPORTANT. Keep mid-funnel conversions at the level of organic purchases.
• Do not try to save on commissions. Pay the full price if you want a guaranteed result and less attention from the marketplace.
• Calculate the effective price of a review so you know what you really pay for a review that survives.

Working with counterparties

• Ask for receipts, SRIDs and reporting.
• Always sign a contract and demand transparent reporting on buyouts and reviews.

How to raise the buyout rate

• Run buyouts and look at the product "through the buyer's eyes" to find the reason people do not order it or do not keep it.