During the peak holiday shopping season, many merchants earn up to 40% of their annual sales. Although sales slow down significantly after you ring in the new year, the flow-on effect of holiday shopping can continue well into the first quarter for merchants. From customer service to returns to inventory replenishment, there’s plenty to stay on top of in the retail industry’s post-holiday push.
What’s more, with all those sales, you’re likely to end up with brand new customers. For Buy with Prime orders in particular, merchants have seen that three out of every four Buy with Prime orders were from new shoppers.* How you delight and engage with them can play a big part in whether they become repeat, loyal customers. The new year is a critical time to nurture relationships, provide top-notch customer service, encourage reviews, and capitalize on valuable new data. And Buy with Prime can help you with all of that.
Deliver best-in-class ecommerce customer service
Customers are likely to have questions about their holiday gift orders. If they need help after completing a Buy with Prime order, there are three ways they can get support:
- Customer self-service resources: Self-service resources help your customers find answers to common post-order questions, including order details, order tracking, and refund status. After completing a purchase using Buy with Prime, the customer receives a confirmation email that links to an order details page. When a customer chooses the “Get support” button on the page, a dynamic list appears with a robust collection of content topics that are contextually relevant based on the customer’s order status. Selecting one of the displayed options takes the customer to a resolution page with details about why they might be experiencing the issue and guidance for resolving it.
- Live chat support: If the customer needs help right away or prefers to reach a live customer service representative, they can get 24/7 real-time support using the Buy with Prime Assist chat feature. They can initiate a chat through their Buy with Prime order confirmation email or through their Amazon account on the Buy with Prime Orders page. Buy with Prime Assist delegates customer service for Buy with Prime order-related queries to trained Amazon representatives to offer round-the-clock, human-assisted support through live chat. This saves you from needing a dedicated Buy with Prime customer service team in-house to handle customer queries, and frees up your existing customer service team to support other orders. You can also request customer service data from merchant support about customer inquiries.
- Contacting you directly: If Buy with Prime customers have questions about your brand or products, they’re directed to your customer service email, allowing you to speak about your brand and products in your own brand voice.
Go to the knowledge center customer service solutions article for more details.
Offer easier online returns
Customers or gift recipients might need to return their orders. All Buy with Prime orders are covered by the Amazon Pay A-to-z Guarantee, allowing customers to return eligible purchases free within 30 days of delivery.
And now returns require even less effort. Prime members who check out using Buy with Prime directly on brands’ sites can choose from an expanded number of dropoff locations to return items without boxing up or labeling them. To return items from a Buy with Prime order, your customers simply bring the items to an available dropoff location that’s convenient for them and show a QR code.
And during the holiday season, customers or gift recipients have more time to make returns with Amazon’s extended returns policy. Most products purchased on Amazon.com or through Buy with Prime from November 1 to December 31, 2023, are eligible for return through January 31, 2024.
Nurture customer relationships
The new year is a perfect time to build relationships with the new and existing customers who made purchases during the holiday shopping season. Because Buy with Prime merchants get to keep their customer and order data, including email addresses, you can connect with your customers directly to build and maintain lasting relationships.
Using customer contact details and Buy with Prime analytics you can provide personalized support and outreach and create powerful remarketing campaigns. Buy with Prime apps for a number of email marketing providers, including Klaviyo, Yotpo, and Omnisend, automatically sync your Buy with Prime orders with the providers’ platforms, making sending personalized emails easy. The integrations allow you to create a variety of automated email campaigns to nurture customer relationships, including welcome, cross-promotional, and upsell emails. With segmentation, you can condition and customize automated flows, ensuring that your messages resonate with high-intent customers in email and even across channels. You can also use automated and coupon code promotions for products that offer Buy with Prime in nurture campaigns to help drive repeat purchases.
Build up authentic customer reviews
With such a high volume of sales at the end of the year, January is a perfect time to build up customer reviews, helping you collect valuable feedback and providing social proof for future shoppers. While third-party review features can help you collect and share reviews, they can’t replicate the same scale of high-quality reviews that shoppers have come to trust on Amazon.com. Reviews from Amazon helps amplify your existing reviews feature, providing shoppers with more information, such as verified purchase badging and images provided by real customers. For your products that offer Buy with Prime, the feature pulls reviews from your Amazon.com listings and displays them directly on the product pages on your ecommerce site.
By displaying Reviews from Amazon on your Buy with Prime product pages, you give shoppers the social proof that they seek to confidently make purchases on your site. In fact, when merchants add Reviews from Amazon to their site, they have experienced a +38% increase in shopper conversion, on average.** In addition to building trust, authentic customer reviews can help you improve brand credibility, search engine optimization, and your overall shopping experience.
Get ahead on inventory
Restocking inventory after the shopping season doesn’t have to be a headache. And if you’re also an Amazon seller or use Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF), inventory management is made even easier. Existing Amazon.com sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) can use their FBA inventory for their MCF sales channels and Buy with Prime orders. When you add Buy with Prime to your ecommerce site, you can increase capacity limits and use a single pool of inventory to fulfill orders across sales channels. If you’re an Amazon Retail vendor, there’s a similar solution for Buy with Prime that allows you to transfer inventory that you already inbounded and sold to Amazon Retail to your MCF account to cover orders from Buy with Prime and other channels.
So whether your orders came through Amazon.com, Buy with Prime, or your site’s native checkout, you’re covered during spikes in demand and you can scale your logistics operations up on demand with pay-as-you-go pricing for fulfillment and storage. (For more, download the Simplifying Fulfillment ebook.)
After the shopping surge, you’ll need to replenish your stock. Don’t wait to ship more inventory to Amazon fulfillment centers so it can be used across your sales channels and you can avoid the risk of stockouts in the new year.
When it matters most—before, during, and after the holiday crunch—Buy with Prime empowers you to provide customers with the support that they need, build up your customer reviews, nurture relationships, and stay on top of your inventory.
Start off the new year right by simplifying operations, saving time, and delighting shoppers all year long with Buy with Prime.
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*Data is from a sample of 14 merchants with average monthly website traffic between 10K to 1.5M. “New shoppers” means shoppers who had not made a purchase on the merchant’s site since January 1, 2021 and completed a purchase using Buy with Prime.
**Data is from a sample of eight Buy with Prime merchants with average monthly site traffic between 10,000 and 1 million, 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.