Last week, Amazon announced the introduction of Buy with Prime, a brand new initiative for Prime members that will grow the convenience of Prime shopping to online stores outside of Amazon. This is a momentous change to its business strategy that we believe was made to compete with fast-growing rival Shopify.
Online store owners who use Fulfillment by Amazon to ship and deliver products will be able to add “Buy with Prime” buttons to their shops. Visitors with Amazon Prime will then be able to purchase products via this button while using Amazon Prime's very useful benefits, mainly next-day delivery, free returns on eligible orders, and free shipping. Prime subscribers will see the Prime logo and delivery promise on eligible products on store owners' sites, which indicates that the item is available for free delivery, as fast as the next day, with free returns. Prime checkout also uses the payment and shipping details stored in the user's Amazon account to ensure a quick and seamless checkout.
How does Buy With Prime affect Shopify store owners?
For Shopify merchants who are already using FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon), Buy with Prime can be enabled on their online store within minutes. This is because their inventory is already stored in Amazon fulfillment centers; thus, no further setup to integrate with Amazon is required. To get started, store owners sign up for Buy with Prime, link their Amazon Seller Central account, enable Multi-Channel Fulfillment to offer a single pool of inventory for multiple channels, and link their Amazon Pay account to ensure a slick checkout experience for Prime-subscribed visitors. To add the button to your store, installing a JavaScript widget is required for your Buy with Amazon button to display on one or more products.
The inclusion of Buy with Prime has numerous benefits for store owners; for starters, it gives visitors who have Prime an initiative to buy your products. The addition of a Buy with Prime button will also boost your conversion rates due to adding another layer of legitimacy to your store; some wary customers might be put at ease when they see your store is integrated with an eCommerce giant like Amazon.
Does Buy with Prime work with Shopify?
Designed to integrate with almost all online stores, Buy with Prime does integrate with Shopify stores. However, from the looks of Amazon's official announcement of the new feature, it seems they are focusing specifically on the e-commerce platform BigCommerce. “Buy with Prime represents a compelling value-add for BigCommerce merchants who wish to increase their sales and optimize the omnichannel experience they provide their customers,” said Troy Cox, senior vice president of product at BigCommerce, as quoted from Amazon's press release.
Is Buy with Amazon free?
According to Amazon, the Buy with Prime feature will cost merchants an unrevealed total that is calculated based on a service fee, a payment processing fee, and fulfillment and storage fees that are calculated per unit the company said. No long-term subscription or contract is required, and merchants can cancel at any time.
Amazon's History of Antitrust
The addition of this feature seems like the start of Amazon trying to amend relations with merchants, as a common complaint launched against Amazon by sellers is that it tightly regulates their relationships with customers. If you sell your products on Amazon, you get the benefit of placing your products in one of the internet's biggest storefronts, with features like Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Prime, making delivery easier and quicker for both you and your customers. But you also get Amazon peeking over your shoulder, accumulating data on what you sell, with the ever-looming threat that it will copy your product and put you out of business. (This is what the company is accused of doing in various recent antitrust lawsuits.) Yet, by offering Prime advantages on store owners' own sites, Amazon is easing its grasp on merchant-customer relations. As one Amazon executive emphasizes in the blog post announcing the Buy with Prime initiative: “Allowing merchants to offer Prime shopping benefits on their own direct-to-consumer online stores is an exciting next step in our mission to help merchants of all sizes grow their business.”
All in all, the development of the Buy with Prime feature shows Amazon taking a step in the right direction to better their merchant-to-customer problems.
