What if you could get all the benefits of selling to Amazon Prime members without actually selling on Amazon? For years, many sellers have neglected their own stores to focus on Amazon. With the new Buy with Prime feature, those sellers might be able to offer the same free shipping, expedited delivery, easy returns, and quick checkout outside of the Amazon site—even including the Prime logo!
Because Buy with Prime is still new, there are a lot of questions going around about how it works. Here, we break down everything we know so far to prepare you for this potentially game-changing opportunity.
Just launched in April 2022, Buy with Prime is a new feature that allows certain merchants (see eligibility below) to offer Prime benefits in their own stores—in other words, sites other than Amazon.com. Within the Amazon marketplace, selling with Prime has often been a gateway to more clicks, conversions, and happy customers. Amazon is a trusted sales platform, and the Prime badge is something that people look for. Prime members are frequent shoppers who spend more, so it makes sense to market your products to this buying pool on your own eCommerce site.
Participating merchants will be able to display the Prime logo and special buy button on select products within their own sites. Prime members can then sign into their Amazon accounts on external sites and are taken to a hosted checkout on Amazon Pay where their payment information and shipping details are already pre-populated. Buy with Prime does not affect the site’s native checkout and shoppers are redirected back to the original site after completing their purchase.
Aside from the fast and convenient checkout, Prime members can also expect the same fast and free delivery they get when shopping on Amazon, along with the same shopper-friendly returns policy.
Once you begin offering Buy with Prime, you'll have access to customer information, including emails and addresses, so you can build direct relationships with shoppers and fulfill any customer service requests as needed. Moreover, Amazon’s policies for price and selection parity do not apply to external sites (although they still apply to your on-site Amazon listings).
So what’s the big deal? If you’re not already a Prime seller, why should you bother? And if you are a Prime seller, why not just stick to selling on Amazon?
For starters, selling to Prime members is already a lucrative opportunity for any Amazon seller. Keep in mind that the people who sign up for Prime generally shop online a lot—how else could they justify paying for that pricy Prime membership? So any sales strategy that targets Prime members has a higher conversion chance than targeting non-members.
Then there are the built-in perks for Prime shoppers: free shipping, one- and two-day delivery, convenient returns, and more. Prime essentially acts as a trustworthy care package with everything regular online shoppers want. Free shipping alone is enough to spark shopper interest: 90% of consumers say they’d shop online more often if free shipping were available.
The option to offer those perks anywhere, especially on a site you control, is a big deal. Not only do you avoid all the competition on Amazon, but it also drives more traffic to your own site. The ability to design your own pages in styles that accent your branding and sales strategy is a serious advantage over the static, one-size-fits-all Amazon product pages.
On top of that, you can shift your marketing and advertising budget away from Amazon and onto your own site. Of course, it’s still worthwhile to maintain your presence on Amazon—after all, not all Prime shoppers are going to find you outside of Amazon—but Buy with Prime nonetheless gives you more independence to promote your own brand.
Related Reading: Amazon Buy with Prime Marketing Solutions: New Features
Don’t get your hopes up just yet: Buy with Prime is still in its infancy, and at the moment it’s invite-only. That said, if you meet the criteria you can join Amazon’s Interest List for a chance to be selected.
To be eligible you must meet these requirements:
If those requirements sound strict, it’s not all bad news. For instance, you don’t need to sell on Amazon at all to participate. As long as you’re using FBA (and meet the other criteria), you’re still eligible for Buy with Prime, even if you’re not active on the Amazon marketplace. FBA offers solutions for storage and shipping to a wide variety of eCommerce sellers, so in the future you can expect to see plenty of independent sellers offering Prime items all over the internet.
On January 10, 2023, Amazon shared some early findings about Buy with Prime and updated sellers on the program’s future.
Amazon reported that Buy with Prime has been shown to increase conversion rates by an average of 25%. Additionally, Amazon announced that the program will be widely available to US-based sellers by January 31, 2023.
Buy with Prime sellers will now also be able to display ratings and reviews from Amazon customers on their own online stores at no additional cost. (Ready to increase your reviews to make your products more marketable? Give FeedbackFive a try!)
For those of you wondering about the fees involved, here’s what has been reported so far: Buy with Prime fees are anywhere from 20-40% per transaction, with products below $20 facing higher rates due to a $1.50 per-order minimum Prime service fee. Fees include this service fee, a per-order payment processing fee, a per-unit fulfillment fee, and an inventory storage fee that you pay monthly by cubic foot.
Fulfillment fees are dependent on the product’s weight and size, similar to those with Fulfillment by Amazon and Multi-Channel Fulfillment.
Buy with Prime only launched a short time ago, so everything is still new. But based on Amazon's early reports, it seems to be working!
It'll be interesting to see if this move lessens any of the antitrust scrutiny Amazon continues to face. It also seems to be a direct response to competitors like Shopify which give sellers greater control and more access to their customers. Will this tactic work? Time will tell.
We’ll keep you posted on any news as it develops. In the meantime, check out our blog regularly for more Amazon news and selling tips, and keep your Amazon account in high standing with our accredited Amazon seller software.
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