Buy with Prime offers an intriguing proposition for ecommerce business owners seeking to grow their direct-to-consumer sales channel.
As a new offering, Buy with Prime also brings up some important questions busy business leaders need answered. For example: Why do I need to manage a separate channel? What’s the benefit of linking Buy with Prime and Seller Central? How do I manage the separate product catalogs across Seller Central, Buy with Prime, and my own site?
In this article, we address some of the questions we’ve been hearing from existing and prospective Buy with Prime merchants.
The Basics: Do I need to manage two separate channels?
If you’re an Amazon seller, you’re probably pretty familiar with Seller Central. It’s a portal that allows you to stay on top of orders, manage your product catalog, track metrics, set prices, and monitor customer feedback, and much more.
If you’re just starting selling with Amazon, check out What is Seller Central?
Like Seller Central, the Buy with Prime merchant console is a one-stop portal for managing your Buy with Prime inventory and orders. Within the merchant console, you can generate the code to add the Buy with Prime button to your product detail pages, select products and variations to build out your catalog of products, and manage your orders and returns.
Think of the two portals this way: Seller Central is for managing your selling account with Amazon, while the merchant console is for managing Buy with Prime products sold on your ecommerce site.
Linking: Do I have to link Buy with Prime and Seller Central?
When setting up Buy with Prime, Seller Central account linking is required so that you can connect your existing Amazon.com catalog with your Buy with Prime catalog for products that you plan to sell on your ecommerce site. Linking these accounts is also required to get the code for adding the Buy with Prime button to product pages on your site.
Specifically, Buy with Prime uses your Seller Central account information to:
- Identify your inventory in Amazon fulfillment centers.
- Import your Amazon.com product listings into your Buy with Prime catalog.
- Register for Amazon Pay (requires an active Amazon Pay account.)
- Activate Prime shipping for Buy with Prime products on your site.
After your accounts are linked, you can start offering your customers 1-2 day shipping and a familiar checkout experience trusted by millions of shoppers. Linking your accounts also gives your shoppers the assurance that Buy with Prime orders placed on your site are backed by Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee.
Catalogs: How do I manage the separate product catalogs?
When it comes to adding products to your Buy with Prime catalog, you have several choices. With your accounts linked, you can import your Amazon.com products and decide which products you want to add to your Buy with Prime catalog on your site.
When you import your existing catalog into the Buy with Prime merchant console, information such as product titles, images, price, and SKU data are automatically exported over.
There are some important things you should know about your Seller Central and Buy with Prime catalogs. If you make any changes to product listings on Seller Central and you want the changes to reflect on your ecommerce site, you can log into merchant console and refresh individual products or your entire Buy with Prime catalog at any time.
Similarly, if you make changes to your Buy with Prime product catalog, these changes aren’t automatically reflected in Seller Central. For example, if you change naming conventions of Buy with Prime SKUs to match the naming convention on your site, the new names aren’t automatically reflected in your Seller Central catalog. You would have to make those changes in Seller Central manually, as you wish.
Linking your Seller Central and Buy with Prime catalogs means you can tap into omni-channel sales with one shared inventory pool and two separate catalogs.
Benefits: How does linking my accounts help me grow?
After you’ve connected your Seller Central and Buy with Prime accounts, you’re in the driver’s seat in determining which products to make eligible for Buy with Prime on your site.
While we recommend offering Buy with Prime for your site’s best-selling products, they may be different from your top performers on Amazon.com. This is where two separate catalogs can come in handy.
By managing sales on your ecommerce site separately from those on Amazon.com, you can get a detailed view of your business across the individual sales channels. What’s more, you can use order analytics from both Seller Central and Buy with Prime to measure sales impact.
Two linked accounts, two separate but connected catalogs, and one pool of inventory give you more choices to run and grow your ecommerce business.
If you’re interested in adding Buy with Prime to your ecommerce mix, you can sign up here. If you’re an existing Buy with Prime merchant, you can learn more about account linking, catalog management, analytics and much more in our knowledge center.