By 2027, forecasts indicate that nearly one-quarter of all global retail sales will be made online. Meanwhile, many traditional retail enterprises are struggling to bridge the gap between physical and digital retail. Going forward, traditional brands and retailers that established their presence in the heyday of brick-and-mortar commerce will have to adapt to meet the challenges of this digital reality, or risk being left behind.
Buy with Prime Enterprise Sales Executive Simon Contreras Candiales has worked on the front lines of the consumer goods industry for 25 years at the likes of Diageo and Procter & Gamble. He offers his unique perspective on the value of Buy with Prime for traditional retailers as they face the multipronged challenges of shifting consumer behaviors and the internal frictions of embracing digital.
The challenge for traditional brands and retailers
The issues that both traditional brick-and-mortar retailers and physical brands face are similar.
“The majority of their business is offline in physical stores, and manufacturers in particular typically sell their goods through retailers’ physical stores,” Simon explains. “Traditional retailers and manufacturers know how to ship truckload of products to retail stores or distribution centers. They know how to advertise and sell at scale. Their challenge is how to sell and deliver single-unit orders to an individual shopper cost effectively. It’s painfully expensive to decouple a single unit from one manufacturing plant and ship it all the way to someone’s doorstep.”
Similarly, for a brick-and-mortar retailer with inventory sitting in a back room, the logistics costs of picking, packing, and shipping that individual product to a consumer can be daunting.
“It’s one of the reasons why so many companies struggle to set up their direct-to-consumer operation without losing an arm and a leg,” Simon says. “Buy with Prime strives to help virtually anyone become a direct-to-consumer seller and set up their store with less friction than ever before.”
Whether you’re a retailer or a brand, Simon notes, what Buy with Prime offers to enterprises is essentially a consolidation of three fundamental opportunities:
- Logistics and fulfillment support
- Friction-free checkout
- The opportunity to build direct relationships
Buy with Prime solution: logistics and fulfillment
With Buy with Prime, eligible orders on your ecommerce site are fulfilled by Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF). And for products that don’t offer Buy with Prime, you can use MCF directly to fulfill those orders. “From a logistics point of view, we help level the playing field in terms of direct-to-consumer fulfillment,” he says.
MCF is a third-party logistics (3PL) solution that allows ecommerce businesses to leverage Amazon’s world-class fulfillment network to pick, pack, ship, and deliver customer orders placed on sales channel beyond Amazon. For Buy with Prime orders, your customers get to enjoy a Prime shopping experience beyond Amazon.com—including fast, free shipping, transparent delivery estimates, and free returns on eligible orders. And with automatic inventory distribution, Amazon stores your products as close as possible to your customers to keep shipping times and costs low.
“Instead of having to invest capital into logistics infrastructure, like warehouses, and operations personnel, MCF lets you use Amazon’s fulfillment network and resources on-demand,” Simon explains. “With MCF’s pay-as-you-go pricing, you only pay for the storage and fulfillment services that you need. In other words, you use a little, you pay a little, you use more, you pay proportionately more, but always as a fraction of your total sales.”
What’s more, if you’re an Amazon Retail vendor you can allow real-time transfers between your ecommerce inventory and the inventory that you previously inbounded and sold to Amazon Retail if either pool is out of stock when an order is placed.
“That means in some cases we can even help you flip the Amazon Retail inventory and make it available through your own website, which gives you the advantage of testing the waters to see how Buy with Prime works for you,” Simon says.
Buy with Prime solution: friction-free checkout
What you also get with Buy with Prime is a seamless payment process.
“Buy with Prime offers merchants the ability to have Prime members check out using the shipping and payment information stored in their Amazon accounts,” Simon explains.
With their payment and shipping information prepopulated, your customers don’t have to enter their information to shop on your website. And with the Buy with Prime badge on product pages and the Buy with Prime button at checkout, they see a brand that they already know and trust.
“Because merchants can offer a seamless checkout and familiar brand, many are seeing increases in shopper conversion,” says Simon. In fact, Buy with Prime has been shown to increase shopper conversion by 25% on average.*
He adds, “And with features like Reviews from Amazon that allow you to leverage authentic customer reviews from your Amazon listings directly on your Buy with Prime product pages, you can enhance shoppers’ checkout experience further and see impactful results.” When merchants add Reviews from Amazon to eligible Buy with Prime products, they’ve seen a more than 38% increase in shopper conversion, on average.**
Buy with Prime solution: building direct relationships
For consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, wholesalers, and manufacturers specifically, connecting with the end users can be challenging because their products are sold to consumers through enterprise retailers that often charge for access to customer contact information. The retailers might also charge these entities to advertise to consumers in their loyalty programs. “If you’re a brand or CPG manufacturing company, you’re likely to have to add those services to your cost of doing business as part of your marketing activities,” Simon explains.
“Buy with Prime makes it possible for you to engage directly with your customers,” he says. “This means that not only can you sell to them directly, but you also control your data. Your brand is the merchant of record, so the data from that transaction belongs to you. It’s an important piece of the equation.”
For wholesalers, manufacturers, and CPG brands, this presents a rare opportunity.
“You can engage with Prime members and include the trust of Prime in your marketing materials,” Simon explains, also noting the Social Ads for Buy with Prime solution. “It’s a unique and exclusive service being offered only to Buy with Prime merchants.”
Plug-and-play setup
No matter how big your company, adding Buy with Prime to your site is an important decision. But for larger companies, it’s a decision that likely has to be evaluated across many business leaders and tech teams. The good news for these larger brands and retailers that already have an ecommerce website and systems in place is that Buy with Prime was built to be set up as seamlessly as possible. And for large Amazon sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon or Amazon Retail vendors, it’s even easier because you already have the inventory piece covered.
“From a technical point of view, we try to make it as simple as possible,” says Simon. “We have integrations available with popular ecommerce service providers like Shopify and BigCommerce and integrations with other solutions, like Klaviyo and Yotpo.” For these integrations, Buy with Prime apps streamline setup and sync with the platforms or solutions. But even if you don’t use any of those, the Buy with Prime buy-now or cart widgets can be added to product pages with a small string of code.
While there’s no perfect solution for traditional, physical retailers and brands to bridge the digital divide, Buy with Prime is one that comes pretty close.
To get started with Buy with Prime, sign up today. Or, if you’re an Amazon Retail vendor, contact us to learn more about the Buy with Prime vendor solution.
*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.
**Data is from a sample of eight Buy with Prime merchants with average monthly site traffic between 10,000 and 1M and compares the number of shoppers who placed an order when Reviews from Amazon was present on a product page versus when it was not, during the same time period.