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Vac & Vacuums on working with Dazzle Commerce
An appliance brand losing the buy box to its own resellers while returns climbed on a core model. Devin Okafor on the audit that found one cause behind both — and the conversation we could not have for him.
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Reviewed by Devin Okafor
Founder, Vac & Vacuums
SECTOR
Electronics
PLATFORM
Amazon & eBay
MARKET
Europe
ENGAGEMENT
12 weeks, ongoing
Marketplace strategy, reseller pricing and catalogue ownership treated as one problem rather than three.
EXPERT VIEW
“Our Amazon catalog was a mess after three years of quick fixes. They rebuilt it properly, and we recovered the Buy Box on our top sellers within a quarter. No drama, no rebuild of the rebuild.”
Devin Okafor · Founder, Vac & Vacuums
Published with the client’s approval following the engagement review. The case study sets out how each figure below was measured.
- Before the call
Why they went looking for an agency
Two symptoms, both getting worse, both apparently unrelated.
“Buy-box share was falling on the range that matters most to us, and returns on one model were climbing at the same time.”
We had grown through distribution. Resellers carried us into several European marketplaces years before we sold there directly, which built volume quickly and worked well for everyone involved — right up until we started selling on the same listings ourselves.
By then nobody actually owned the listings. Several parties were editing them, our own repricer was reacting to people we had signed contracts with, and every week was an argument with somebody.
Six months of buy-box history reconstructed from the ground up. The floor had been walked down one step at a time.
- First
What they had already tried
Three attempts, none of which touched the actual cause.
“We wrote to the resellers twice. We raised the repricer floor, then raised it again, and watched the buy box go somewhere else both times.”
We also added a returns survey, and got answers we could not act on — because we did not know which product the customer had actually received. That should have told us something. It did not, for about eight months.
- Onboarding
The first ninety days, from their side
An audit first, and nothing proposed until it was finished.
Every listing checked against the real product specification, model by model, before a single recommendation was written.
“They audited every listing against the real specification and reconstructed six months of buy-box history before proposing anything.”
The output was uncomfortable reading. It showed the repricer had been walking our own floor down, an hour at a time, for half a year — reacting to undercuts from resellers, matching them, and establishing a new floor that the next undercut then started from.
Nobody had been watching it, because it was doing exactly what we had configured it to do.
- The finding
What surprised them
The returns were not a quality problem. They were a description problem.
“Three genuinely different models were sharing one parent listing.”
Customers buying the mid-tier machine were receiving something with different runtime and different attachments, and the reviews were attached to whichever product had been merged in last. Variations had been split and re-merged so many times over the years that the catalogue no longer described what was in the box.
We had been treating the returns as a manufacturing question and the buy box as a commercial one. They were the same listing, telling the same story twice.
Three models, one parent listing, and reviews attached to whichever product had been merged in most recently.
- Outcome
What changed
Measured across two quarters against a pre-engagement baseline. Returns are counted as a share of units shipped, so a price change cannot flatter the number.
+44%
Buy-box share
On the core cordless range
-17%
Return rate
On the model driving most returns
+26%
Marketplace revenue
Across Amazon and eBay in Europe
7 wks
To payback
On the engagement fee
- Their advice
What they would tell another brand considering us
Offered as advice to a peer rather than praise for us.
“Get your distribution agreements out before the first call.”
Half of what made this engagement work was a written pricing policy, and we could only write one because somebody finally read the contracts we already had. If you sell through resellers on marketplaces you also sell on directly, that paperwork is the engagement, whatever the proposal says on the cover.
- The criticism
What they would change
Every review on this site carries one of these. We publish them unedited.
“The reseller conversation was ours to have, and they could not have it for us.”
That landed on my desk in week five, once the catalogue work was ready and the pricing policy needed signing. I would have preferred it flagged as our workstream on day one, with a date against it, rather than arriving as a dependency at the point where everything else was waiting on it.
They were not wrong to hand it to me. They were late telling me it was coming.
- In summary
Rated highest, rated lowest
No stars. Reviews of our own business, hosted on our own site, are not independent and we are not going to dress them up as though they were.
RATED HIGHEST
Diagnosis. Two symptoms we had been treating separately for the best part of a year turned out to have one cause, and they found it by reading the catalogue rather than by running anything clever.
RATED LOWEST
Sequencing the client-side work. The commercial conversations we had to own ourselves were surfaced in week five rather than week one, and that cost us a fortnight we did not need to lose.
- The work behind this review
What actually ran on this account
Four service lines, one team, one plan. Each links to how we run that service generally.
The full methodology, the baseline, the sequencing and what we would do differently.
Catalogue structure, pricing policy and buy-box health — the service that owned the change that mattered here.
Listing copy, image stacks and A+ content built to answer the questions that were driving returns.
Rebuilding titles, attributes and back-end terms after separating the listings reset their ranking history.
One owner for listing content, pricing and reseller relations, on a weekly rhythm.
- More client stories
Other engagements, in their own words
Reviews are being published one at a time. Where a review is not live yet, the case study is the fuller account.
CLIENT REVIEW
A UK supplements brand that came to us planning to cut acquisition spend, and finished the quarter raising it.
CASE STUDY
A US cookware brand whose revenue grew while profit stayed flat, and the shipping rule behind it.
ALL REVIEWS
Every quote we publish, each sitting next to the work that produced it.
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