What exactly is Buy with Prime and why does it matter? On this 155th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff dives into Buy with Prime. As a member of the Buy with Prime advisory council, Andrew shares his impartial insights on the advantages and challenges of this feature.

At its core, a major appeal of Buy with Prime is its potential to enhance customer trust and loyalty among consumers significantly. This feature allows buyers to use their Prime membership benefits directly on third-party websites, creating a seamless shopping experience that can lead to increased satisfaction and repeat purchases. However, like any service, it comes with its own set of drawbacks, which we'll highlight in this episode. If you’re an Amazon seller this episode is a must-listen!

Watch the full episode below, or visit TheEcommShow.com for more.

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Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Everything Buy with Prime Sellers Need to Know with Andrew Maff

Andrew Maff 

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

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I don't get paid to do this. There's no benefit to my end of it. It's just a I wanted to do this simply because I get a lot of questions around the benefits, the pros, the cons of it, why any would want to use it?  Hello and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show as usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I wanted to use our episode to talk to you about Amazon's buy with prime. Now buy with Prime has been out for, I believe, about a year and a half, two years, and before I kind of get into it and explain a lot of what I know of it, I do want to caveat that I am on the Buy with prime Advisory Council. I am a big fan of the functionality. We have helped implement it on a ton of different brands websites. However, I have no tie to their success. I have nothing to do. I don't get paid to do this. There's there's no benefit to my end of it. It's just a I wanted to do this simply because I get a lot of questions around the benefits, the pros, the cons of it. Why anyone want to use it? And to be honest, if you're a traditional DTC seller, you have your own website, and you also sell on Amazon. Amazon's kind of the enemy, right? You don't want to share your data. You don't want them to know what's going on, etc. And it's very justifiable. Now, as of the recording of this I have now last week come back from Amazon accelerate, where I had a meeting with the Buy with prime Advisory Council, as well as with all the other partners. And you know, we get to see all the fun, like cool beta stuff they're testing and stuff that's getting launched soon, and they take our feedback on what it's like to implement and work with brands and blah blah. So if you're unfamiliar with what buy with prime is, buy with prime is, at its face value, a button that is added to your DTC website, where users can come to your website use the Buy with prime checkout, where they benefit from everything that Amazon's prime has so they can get it in A couple days. They know the return policies, etc. And the nice thing is that, you know, you have your branding from Amazon on there. It's kind of a quicker checkout, right? So sort of like an express checkout, you also have a bunch of other elements to it. So you have, you can pull in all of your reviews from Amazon and showcase them on your site. So for example, when we use implementations for these. Typically, what we do is we'll actually add a tab where you have, like, website reviews, and then you can flip and see all the Amazon reviews, all on the PDP of the main website. You can also have however many you know, your star reviews up by your pricing, like you always have. Buy with prime does have its own checkout. So when they check out, they do have upsell opportunities for other products that you have on buy with prime on there. Buy With Prime integrates with both Facebook, Google and Klaviyo, as well as several other platforms. But the nice thing with that is, if someone converts on your website, then obviously these platforms are now aware of it, as opposed to just being a black box. And of course, the one thing everyone always asks about is you get to keep your data. So you get the users, first name, last name, address, email address, all that fun stuff. One of the things that I always was asked about was, how does this benefit your Amazon business? So it really helps with basically, fulfillment through FBA. They do their pricing is a little bit interesting, right? So if you're interested in looking at bioprime, I believe they have a calculator up on the site now, but there's typically about a 3% commission. There is no FBA fee, but they do use MCF fulfillment costs, right? So you'd have to do some math. In my, my opinion, any product under 25 $30 it's rare that it ever works out. It's possible, but it kind of has to do with the math on how they look at the different cost structures around that. So you have to look at that. But the benefit of obviously, getting that data always becomes interesting of how you. Leverage it. So one of the things that we look at now as of the taping of this in the next couple days, I actually have an event that I'm doing with both the Buy with prime team and the quartile team to talk about the different marketing strategies for overall omni channel marketing strategies that you can use for your brand, not specific to buy with prime. And every time I talk about buy with prime, I always like to really caveat it to brands. Of there are pros and there are definitely cons to it. I love the Buy with prime team. They're all super nice to know. They're gonna watch this and be like, Dude, you're supposed to just say that, where everything's flawless, but it's not. It's just not. For example, when I get that question of, you know, how does this help my Amazon business? It helps you with getting stuff out of FBA, especially if you're having, you know, stuff sitting in inventory. But even if someone buys something from you, from buy with prime, if they were to leave a review, that review is going to be the typical review that would go on your website. It will not be a review on Amazon, the sell through of that product on your website does not benefit the sell through and the ranking on your Amazon listings. So buy with prime is really a faster way for Amazon to help you fulfill and basically leverage Amazon's pre existing brand awareness in the market to help with conversions. Now, we've done, as I mentioned, probably dozens of implementations of biocrime at this point. I always say, if the math lines up that it's 100% worth the test, there is no fee to try it. They don't charge you for setting it up and then eventually taking it down. I usually say, you know, we're VWO partners, so a lot of times like we'll just like, we'll just throw it into a VWO do it as an AB test for a little while and see how it does. I have, uh, several case studies that we've done, one of which we did with buy with prime, where it showed, I'd have to go back and look, I should have had that ready. Sorry, but it's basically like it was, like a 60 something percent increase within a week of their conversion rate, and that didn't include the orders on buy with prime and the my theory around that is that the users who are coming to the website were so comfortable with the fact that this brand sold their product on Amazon that it kind of helped legitimize the brand a little bit. But because of the additional incentives they had on their website, they were actually encouraged to just shop on the website. So they converted more frequently. There were no sales going on. We changed nothing with ads. We made sure to let it run. That metric held still for weeks and weeks and weeks until we just stopped running the test because we knew it was going to work to that point, though, I have also put buy with prime on several websites, and it did jack shit. So sometimes it just breaks even. It's like, All right, well, it's there now, and it's kind of an added value, but it's really not doing a lot. So it kind of depends, from a conversion rate perspective, I think it's definitely something worth AB testing, but that's, you know, six and one half does another one, whether you try or not. Then comes down to the way that you leverage the data that you're getting. Now, there's a lot of ways to leverage this data. Some of our favorite ways are to use the Buy with prime data coming in to actually improve the Amazon business. So as I mentioned, sales coming through buy with prime don't really do much for Amazon business, but it does let you segment your audience. So obviously, as I mentioned, it integrates with meta Google Ads Klaviyo. You can create different audience segments within each of those platforms to showcase which of these users is more likely to convert on Amazon. So when you do a product launch on Amazon and you actually have that 3060, day honeymoon period, you drive that traffic directly to Amazon. Just the people that shop with buy with prime, because you know that they're Amazon shoppers, you incentivize them to make that purchase. You get that extra sell through. You get those extra reviews. It helps with your organic ranking. And then you pivot that traffic back to your website. So there's ways to leverage the data to actually encourage people to shop with you on Amazon if that's the direction you want to go in. Now, at accelerate, one of the things that they talked about, which is basically the big game changer, and it really kind of shows that, okay, Amazon's really leaning into the omni channel strategies, is, if you have buy with prime, you can actually now use Amazon's DSP to drive traffic from Amazon to your website. I think that that is a huge game changer, specifically for brands that, let's say, have high customer acquisition costs, or brands that have subscriptions, because now essentially what's happening is you can drive traffic to Amazon, or you can already have your existing traffic from Amazon, introduce the brand to people that are already shopping, and then run DSP ads to convince them to come shop on your website. Now, obviously, if you have a subscription, and you have a big incentive for them to come to your website and sign up for a subscription, that's a no brainer. Or if you have people that maybe it's recurring per. Purchases. Maybe it's consumables, maybe it's sales that you have running. Just leveraging that kind of data is very beneficial. So for example, one of the things that I thought about immediately is a big DSP audience of anyone that has ever shopped with us in the past for brands that we work with, and then doing a sale around, let's say, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and convincing people to come to my website to purchase there, if they use buy with prime, or if they don't use buy with prime, I then have their data, and I can grow the business from off Amazon and not be as reliant on it as I need to be. In my opinion, I think maybe Amazon is starting to lean really heavily into fulfillment, and, you know, starting to realize that, you know, sellers are getting frustrated with the consistently increase in costs. All of the different low cost sellers are driving the cost down, but it's just not viable for you to be able to bring your costs that low, which means that Amazon is struggling to justify making more and more money. And then on top of that, you're looking at Amazon probably realizing that the amount of people that have adopted using prime is starting to not scale as much as it once was. And so they're now looking at off Amazon, ways to grow these these brands. The other side of it is also the fact that, which I would assume Amazon is aware of this, growing a brand on Amazon alone is damn near impossible. It's difficult to start a brand on Amazon only and build that brand. Amazon is very much a singular product transactional platform, as I'm sure all of you Amazon sellers know that are listening to this. If you launch a new product, it's like launching a new business. It is very difficult to leverage the existing awareness that you have from your other products into your new product lines. So it becomes a struggle. And so by having that audience off Amazon, you then have that stuff to benefit from. There's a ton of other stuff you can do that doesn't involve buy with prime, right? So like, we work with a bunch of brands, where we do SEO for their DTC site, but we also incorporate their Amazon listings. And the reason for that is, as those Amazon listings, the page authority, I should say, of those Amazon listings improves, the ranking of those Amazon listings on Google starts to go up. And so naturally, the search volume and the traffic that they're getting from Google goes up, which means they're getting they're getting traffic to their Amazon listing. Ideally, those people are purchasing if your conversion rate is good enough, in which case your overall ranking improves. So by improving your ranking for your listing on Google, you're improving your ranking for your listing on Amazon that has nothing to do with buyer prime. It's completely left out. Then I look at it the other way of Okay, what if you're on Amazon, you want to test the viability of having your own DTC website? I think buy with prime is a great way to ease into that, where you can create a small landing page for one of your top sellers, drive that traffic to that page, have that buy with prime functionality, and just test the waters before building out an entire website and starting a huge social media strategy and go and just balls to the wall. The other side of it, also being from a buy with prime perspective, is we like to lean on it as a fail safe. So some of the brands we work with buy with prime you don't have to put it on every product. You can put it on one. You can put it on all of them. You can also have buy with prime products completely separate, which is also something that we've started to explore. So some products on people's websites, on brands websites, will have the bioprime functionality, and it's clear it's right there on the PDP. Others, they will actually have a replica of that product hidden with the bioprime functionality. They will do their traditional DTC marketing, going to the website, and if someone doesn't convert, they will then use retargeting to send them back to that page that has the Buy with prime functionality. Or in their retention marketing, their automated emails where they're trying to get people to come back, or they're retargeting ads, etc, they'll leverage the fact that they have buy with prime and try to get that those people back, because the Buy with prime functionality does help, in certain ways, reduce that customer acquisition cost for net new customers. I think it's a fantastic way to lower that barrier to entry and then have different marketing strategies in place where you can then get them to convert the traditional way through your website. To my point, originally, though, there's pros and cons of it, right? Like a we work with a ton of brands that are very, very particular about their branding. And if you have a specific esthetic that you really want to lean into, like, as my wife calls them, like, the Instagram friendly brands, where they just really lean into pastels, for some reason, that bright blue prime button thing that they've got is not exactly lining up with their brand esthetic. And so sometimes it just doesn't they make the call of, hey, it just doesn't look good. And so they're not going to do it. Buy With Prime really likes to tell you to, you know, add a collection with all your buy with prime stuff. Add the Buy with prime low. Go to your ads, add it to your add it to your emails, all of your marketing assets should have the Buy with prime logo. I don't necessarily agree with that. I think that the Buy with prime elements should be a little bit more just available and an added benefit for people, and not necessarily shoved down their throats. But they are also, I know that they're also trying to bring more consumer awareness to the actual functionality in itself. There's a ton of other things. Obviously, they're, they're coming out with integrated shopping carts. So if someone shops with something that is both buy with prime as well as something that isn't buy with prime, you can do that now. So they're they're continuously growing on it, which is fantastic. But there are just definitely products, and there's definitely business owners that just don't want to do it. But there are definitely products where it doesn't work out as well as you'd like either. Obviously you have to be FBA. So if you don't have it sitting in an FBA, you can't do it at all. Last I heard it is still only available in the US, so if you also have a ton of users and customers in other countries, it won't work as well. So, you know, there's pros and cons to it. They are adding in the Subscribe and Save option pretty soon, so that if you want to just have someone do a basic Subscribe and Save, they can do that. You know, the reviews pulling over and showing them. There's something to say about the SEO benefit of those from the added content on there, but also from just a CRO perspective, from the added social proof. So there's, there's a lot of pros and cons to it in in my opinion, as I said, I think it's always a great thing to AB test and give it a try. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work, but at least you tried it, and you can find out. Now, the argument, of course, is, which is my favorite one, I don't want to share my data with Amazon. And the other one is the math. Even though they would be profitable on the sale, just doesn't line up because they're much more profitable on their DTC site. That one, I don't really like that argument. I want to address the first one, Amazon is effectively the devil, and I don't want to share my data with them. Yeah, I totally get it if that's how you feel. There is no real, true argument to that, because it's just your opinion to say that concept, though, means that you're so confident that your product line is so good and so just so light years ahead of everyone else that Amazon's going to get your data, realize how well you're doing and then find a way to put you out of business. I could totally see how that would be a scary thing to consider. I just don't think that that is the case. Last I saw, Amazon is not even really getting into private label as much as they once were, but I think that playing nice with the people in the space is a better move than trying to compete against them at all times. And a lot of bigger brands, as definitely as buy with prime alluded to in our meeting are really starting to pick up the Buy with prime functionality. There are some really big like fortune 500 brands that are starting to put it on their websites, which soon means all of them are going to do it, because it's just a giant pissing contest of who has what. And then that means all the small brands are going to start to do it. And it's really just going to become, you know, as soon as enough people adopt it, it's going to most likely become one of those things where it's just like, yeah, you definitely should have this on your site. I also love it for sell through, especially during q4 when you've got, you know, on your D to C site. If your traditional shipping is, hey, you're gonna get it in, you know, five to seven business days or whatever. If you've got buy with Prime Now you're buying yourself an additional, like, three or four days of shopping days, because they're going to be able to get it in two days. And on that bioprime functionality, it tells you, like, you know, how soon are you going to get it, just like you would have on Amazon? So the other argument of we talked about the data, one for Amazon, the math, one that one I don't buy, and the only reason is because you're not factoring in volume, right? So if you were to get, let's just, I'm horrible at math, so we're going to keep it real easy. If you were to get 10 people to your website, and you anticipated two of those were going to convert at your normal profitability for your DTC site, you're at a what, 20% conversion rate. If you were to sacrifice some profit for maybe three or four sales, and your conversion rate were to jump from 20% to 30 or 40% which, by the way, I know is an obscene number. I just suck at math, at least off the top of my head, then all of a sudden, when you start to factor in that at a scale, it makes a lot more sense. So if you were to sell, you know, 500 products at a lower conversion rate and make X profit, is it okay if you actually sold 1000 products at a higher conversion rate, but at a lower profit? So there's a there's a threshold there, well, all of a sudden, it really does start to make sense. At a low scale, sometimes it just doesn't make sense, and you're absolutely right. So it's one of those things that everyone's going to have a very different opinion on. There is a very clear fact, which is, if you use the calculator on their site, you'll see whether it's even going to make you a single dollar or not. But if it's going to make you some kind of money, there's really not any hard and nothing. Not anything hard, nothing, nothing wrong. Sorry with trying it again. I I don't benefit from this at all. My job is to help sellers, obviously, market their products, develop these marketing strategies. In my opinion, actually, let me backtrack. The reason I feel so strongly this way years ago, before I started blue tusker, even before I was at prior agencies, I was lucky enough to watch my wife shop fantastic, super fun, and one of the things she did made me so mad, because I watched her get targeted from one of the Instagram pastel products she got hit by an Instagram ad. Clicked on the Instagram ad, went to their website and saw the product, like the product, filled out a pop up to get was, let's assume, was like 10% off her order. Then wanted to do some more research, so she went and googled them to see what she could find. She went across a bunch of different stuff. Came across one of their ads that was showing them versus a competitor. So she clicked on the ad, looked at the page of them comparing themselves to the competitor left. Went back to their website, then she went to Amazon, because she was thinking that she wanted to get it in the next couple days. She went to Amazon, saw that the pricing was the exact same, so she didn't purchase it. However, she did look at the listing, images, the a plus content and all the reviews, she then remembered she got her whatever it was, 10% off, went back to her email, got the coupon code, went back to the website and made the purchase. If you were a marketer, you know that in that small time frame, Instagram, Google ads, email and the pop up are all going to take credit for the sale, and Amazon also helped with that. So when I watched her do this, which I watched her do, I let her just go crazy, and I go, Hey, by the way, just start buying stuff, and I'm gonna watch you. And she thought it was great. So obviously, because she got to shop. So I sat there watch her shop. Sometimes she would buy it on Amazon, but she got hit with an Instagram ad. And so when I started to realize this, my logic was, okay, this customer journey is extremely more fluid than I kind of anticipated. Let's do some tests. So at the time, this was an agency I was with prior to Blue tusker, and we ran some tests. And what we did is we left all marketing alone, both on and off Amazon. We didn't change anything. We're gonna keep stuff stagnant. We increased the at the time it was just Facebook ads. We increased Facebook ads by 10% we saw about a six to 7% relevant increase in their revenue on their website, and then about a three to 4% relevant increase on Amazon. I did this with countless brands, and it always happened, people were bleeding over from their website to Amazon and making purchases. And so what I started to do is actually create a fake button. It was in a it said available on Amazon, and I would let people just click on the button and go straight to the Amazon listing. The listing would benefit from the added traffic. Obviously, they converted. They'd benefit from the ad itself through in the reviews, but I would also track the clicks on that button so I could retarget people that hit that button, because I now knew that they were interested in shopping on Amazon, then buy with prime came out. And I was like, Oh, shit. This makes it a lot easier. I already get their data. This is fantastic. So I started doing it that way. That's why I started to really get interested in this approach and why I'm a big fan of the buyer prime side. However, as I mentioned, sometimes the math just doesn't math, and so you've got to sit down. You have to look at the metrics. But I am a big believer of it's definitely worth the AB test at this point we have integrated it with I'd have to look, but I'm sure it's well over two or three dozen brands, big brands, small brands, you name it, completely new websites, sites doing over a million users a month. Like it's all over the place. Everyone sees very different results. And product lines are very different. Some products. The issue with it as well, by the way, is sometimes it'll have the opposite effect. You'll have a product that will actually be something that someone always wants to get within a couple days, where it's just, like a quick, like commodity kind of thing, of like, hey, let's just, I just need this, and so I want to get it in two days. It's right here. I can benefit from getting it in two days. So they use buy with prime more than they would at the traditional DTC. So that's another thing where you've got to look at like, Okay, once I run this test, does that actually make this viable? Or you look at it the other way as well, which is, okay, what types of incentives can I put on my website to encourage people to not use buy with prime if I don't want them to, but I want them to have it as an option, so that I can still get their information and add them into my list of customers, you know, without them just bouncing and completely leaving and going elsewhere. Well. Pros and cons, but now that they're letting DSP take Amazon traffic from Amazon to your website, huge fucking game changer. Super excited for that one. I can see how that's really going to start to work. Started to play around with it, with a few brands, and a few ideas of how that's going to get implemented and how it's going to get tracked. But the overall omni channel strategy, it's something we've been doing for years, and I'm super excited to see stuff like this coming to fruition, because it just makes me go, haha, fuck you. I was right, but basically, sellers are going to have to start looking at their business holistically. You can't keep looking at Amazon as a singular channel and your DTC website as a singular channel. You have to look at the business holistically, because the customer journey is so fluid, digital marketing is easily becoming just like traditional marketing. And what I mean by that is like, you can't really paint the true KPI, the true ROI of a billboard. You're not going to be able to do that with a lot of stuff that you've got going on in digital now, because the customers are going to shop wherever they're most comfortable. Obviously, I know this was a lot, but I felt like it was important for me to kind of discuss the pros and the cons of buy with prime, as well as just omni channel strategies in general. This is where we focus. So it's always fun for me to talk about obviously, I appreciate you all joining me, and if you're looking for more, feel free to head over theecommshow.com For more, please do the usual, rate review, subscribe. All of our past episodes are on theecommshow.com as usual. I appreciate you all joining me. See you all next time. 

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