This post is part of All Eyes on Amazon, our two-week series on getting your listings ready for Alexa for Shopping before Black Friday. On Monday we looked at how Alexa for Shopping became the holiday salesperson for more than 400 million Amazon customers. On Tuesday we launched Enrich, the agents that fix gaps on your listings. Today is about the step that comes first: knowing what to fix.
ReFiBuy’s research team, led by Andrew Bell, studied how Alexa for Shopping presents and explains products across 100,000 shopping prompts. Alexa sorted its picks onto shelves named for a shopper need, and most shelves held three products or fewer. Then it explained each pick with product facts. Use-case suitability was the most common reason, followed by materials and ingredients.
Alexa can only explain a pick with the facts your listing gives it.
That’s why ReFiBuy compares what you sent with what Amazon shows, then scores each ASIN on four readiness checks: Be Available, Be Findable, Be Trusted and Be Chosen. Together they roll up into one Amazon Agentic Commerce Optimization (ACO) Score, out of 100.
Alexa won't stake a recommendation on something the shopper can't buy. Operational signals like stock and a live offer tell Alexa the product is actually for sale right now.
What trips products up: a product that drops in and out of stock, or variants where only some sizes and colors have a live offer. The listing can be perfect and still lose here.
What to fix first: keep your best sellers in stock through the holiday window, and check that every variant you want recommended has an active offer. Some of these signals live outside the product page, in your Seller Central or Vendor Central data.
This is where most listings leave the most on the table. Alexa matches a shopper's question to your product data: the title, bullets and structured attributes. If a detail isn't on the page, Alexa has nothing to match.
What trips products up: picture a shopper asking for "waterproof trail shoes, wide fit." A shoe that is both waterproof and wide still loses if the listing never says "wide," or if the width attribute is blank. Our initial audit found errors on 22% of Amazon product pages, and missing attributes like these are among the most common.
What to fix first: fill the structured attributes Alexa matches on, like width, material, closure and intended use, and make sure your title and bullets say plainly what the product is for and who it fits.
Recommending a product is a small promise. Alexa looks for reasons to believe what your listing says: trust signals on and around the listing, and product details that agree with each other.
What trips products up: contradictions. A title that says "waterproof" next to an attribute that says otherwise. A width in the title that doesn't match the width field. Each one gives Alexa a reason to hesitate, and to explain someone else's product instead.
What to fix first: audit the fields that repeat across your listing (title, bullets, attributes, description) and make them say the same thing.
The last check is about proof that shoppers already pick you. Factors like sales velocity show Alexa that a product isn't just available, findable and credible, but chosen.
What trips products up: leading your own shelf isn't enough.
64.5%
of products leading their own shelf sat below first position in Alexa's full answer
Source: ReFiBuy study of 100,000 Alexa for Shopping prompts
What to fix first: this check moves more slowly than the others, so it's usually the last to improve. Fixing availability, findability and trust is what puts a product in front of more shoppers in the first place.
Each ASIN gets an overall Amazon ACO Score out of 100, its results on all four readiness checks, and every issue we found, grouped by severity: high, medium and low. Some checks, like fulfillment and returns performance, can only be scored with a seller or vendor data pull, and the report flags those separately so you know what’s missing from the picture.
Each report also gives the verdict, and where to start: the fixes to review first, so your team spends its time on the changes that matter most for that product. It assesses the listing; it doesn’t show how the product appears in Alexa’s answers. That’s what Monitor is for.
A score only matters if it changes what you do next. Once you know which check is holding a product back, Enrich in ReFiBuy for Amazon writes the fixes for Be Findable and Be Trusted, your team approves them in the Enrichment Queue, and Monitor, now in preview, shows you how Alexa groups its answers in your category and where your product appears.
Start with one product. Get your free Amazon ACO Report before Black Friday, and we'll show you its score on all four checks and what to fix first.