
Now Available: Buy with Prime app for Shopify
Author: 22 Aug 2023
minutes readThe benefits of shopper cart building are obvious—and can be pretty significant. When shoppers build up their carts before finally checking out, they’re spending more money on your site, saving you money with fewer shipments, and providing you valuable data about shopping trends.
When a shopper adds a product to a cart on an ecommerce site, it’s a strong indicator of intent to make a purchase. Some shoppers complete the purchase in the moment, while others continue browsing to add more items to their cart. There are also some shoppers that build their cart and abandon their purchasing flow for a multitude of reasons. At the end of the day, getting shoppers to click “Add to cart” offers some important signals about product resonance and shopper intentions.
These benefits are exactly why Buy with Prime has been focused on launching the Buy with Prime cart as a necessary enhancement. Shoppers want it. Merchants want it. And it’s here!
By adding the Buy with Prime cart to your online store, Prime members can purchase up to 20 eligible products in one transaction, helping you boost sales and average order value. In fact, merchants have experienced an average 15% increase in Buy with Prime units per order after adding the cart to their sites.*
The Buy with Prime cart also helps you optimize fulfillment costs and reduce waste, because Amazon can fulfill multiple products from one Buy with Prime order in fewer packages. With cart building activity and order data, you can gather insights about which products shoppers buy together to guide product innovation decisions, inventory planning, and marketing strategies.
Merchants with active Buy with Prime products can add the cart in just a few minutes, but Buy with Prime cart works better for some types of ecommerce stores and product categories, including:
The same best practices for optimizing your standard cart apply for Buy with Prime cart, but the added benefit is that the buy-now experience for Buy with Prime has been shown to increase shopper conversion by 25% on average. (This data point measures the average increase in shoppers who placed an order when Buy with Prime was an available purchase option versus when it was not, during the same time period.)
So if you follow these tips to get more of your products in shoppers’ carts—meaning more units per order—then you’re already in good shape to take them across the finish line.
Also known as “mini cart” to some, the Buy with Prime cart icon is the little shopping cart symbol that indicates how many Buy with Prime-eligible products a shopper has waiting in their cart. This icon is visible throughout the shopper’s journey while they browse your site. The shopper can click on this icon at any time to see what’s in their Buy with Prime cart or make changes.
“The default placement for the icon is on the bottom right of the web page, but you can customize the location to your liking,” explains Carolyn, Product Manager at Buy with Prime. “To make it easy for your shoppers to interact with the Buy with Prime cart icon, we recommend placing it in a location that doesn't already have page elements for shoppers to engage with, like buttons and banners.” Consider conducting A/B tests that compare different icon placements to find the one that lands the most clicks and conversions.
Because Buy with Prime cart works best for merchants with Buy with Prime activated on all, or the majority, of their products, an easy tip for optimizing cart is activating more SKUs. It’s a game of numbers: The more products available, the more opportunity for cart building. “And if all your products offer Buy with Prime, then shoppers can buy any combination of products in one transaction using Buy with Prime cart,” Carolyn says, “rather than having to check out twice, once with Buy with Prime and once with your native cart.”
If shoppers on your site can’t find your products that offer Buy with Prime, they can’t add them to a cart—or purchase them. There are a few ways you can help shoppers discover them:
Sprinkle additional messaging throughout your site to help shoppers understand how Buy with Prime cart works and inspire them with an improved shopping experience.
Using an email marketing provider like Klaviyo, you can identify and reengage shoppers that started checking out using Buy with Prime but then dropped off before completing the order. The Klaviyo for Buy with Prime app doesn’t work for shoppers who simply add products to their carts. However, once they start checking out using Buy with Prime—any step after clicking the Buy with Prime button—you can trigger the abandoned checkout email flow if they drop off.
This is something you can—and should—do regardless of whether you activate Buy with Prime cart. What may seem like small adjustments to the look and placement of the Buy with Prime button can actually have a big impact on whether shoppers start adding to their cart—and ultimately convert.
If you’re ready for Prime members to start building their carts on your ecommerce site, sign in to the merchant console and set up Buy with Prime cart. If you’re not yet a Buy with Prime merchant, you can get started today.
*Data is from a sample of 34 Buy with Prime merchants, and 15% is the average of the increase in units per order (comparing 30 days prior to and post cart launch) for each Buy with Prime merchant in the analysis.