When a retailer or manufacturer does well in a category or with its flagship product, it’s not uncommon for the company to create related products, explore adjacent categories, and launch or purchase new brands and sales channels. This is particularly common for large enterprises with numerous verticals, brands, and sales channels under one roof. Research from Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment found that 22% of ecommerce businesses have more than one brand or online store.
But a company doesn’t have to be enterprise level to expand through new brands or sales channels. Take Buy with Prime merchant Great Circle Machinery, for example. This midsize heavy-duty tools and equipment company sells its products on GreatCircleUS.com, and it also owns the brand SuperHandy, which has its own ecommerce site.
The point is, the consumer landscapeis overflowing with brands and products that are owned by parent companies that have expanded and pursued other revenue streams. Expanding and launching additional brands can come with new challenges for a company, though. One of the most common is how business owners or leaders like you can get a comprehensive view into all of your businesses and manage them in one place, especially given the plethora of third-party apps, tools, and services available that all require their own accounts and dashboards.
As you expand, you want a sustainable way to manage Buy with Prime across all of your brands’ ecommerce sites. You want one account, with one set of signin details. You want one console for access to Buy with Prime analytics and activity for all of your businesses and sales channels. You want scalability.
With the recent launch of a new feature in the merchant console, you (or agencies that support Buy with Prime merchants) can now get a centralized view into your businesses that offer Buy with Prime.
“With the account overview, Buy with Prime merchants can now view and manage multiple businesses and the associated sale channels in one place, with one account and one signin,” explains Buy with Prime Sr. Product Manager Jessica Plumbe. “There’s no juggling multiple usernames or passwords, no managing separate accounts or teams across businesses that offer Buy with Prime. We’re empowering merchants with multiple brands, or agencies that support these merchants, with a way to implement Buy with Prime across their different brands or sites in a scalable fashion and a centralized place to manage it all.”
Buy with Prime for multibrand owners
Available to all Buy with Prime merchants, this feature is most relevant if you have multiple brands or ecommerce sites (whether you’ve launched Buy with Prime on only one site or on multiple sites by creating separate accounts for each). It’s compatible with all Buy with Prime integrations, including the Buy with Prime buy-now and cart widgets and app for Shopify.
“Agencies with shared permissions for their clients’ accounts can got to a single account overview for Buy with Prime and easily view a business in merchant console to access data or action on a request without having to sign in and out of different accounts,” Jessica explains.
Beyond the benefits of streamlined account management and a centralized view, the new capability helps you “scale Buy with Prime across you businesses and sales channels more easily,” she says, which means you can grow your ecommerce businesses faster with Buy with Prime. The easier it is for you to launch Buy with Prime across all of your brands’ sites and the more efficiently that you can manage those businesses, the sooner that you can start realizing the benefits of Buy with Prime, including increased conversions and new shoppers. Merchants have seen a 25% increase in shopper conversion with Buy with Prime* and that three out of every four Buy with Prime orders are from new shoppers**, on average.
“If you currently have only one brand or ecommerce site, this feature sets you up for future scaling,” says Jessica. “The feature is built so that you can easily set up and configure future sales channels in a way that works for your business. It’s ready when you’re ready to expand and launch Buy with Prime across additional ecommerce sites.”
What’s changing in merchant console?
There are minimal changes to the look and feel of the merchant console for Buy with Prime. “You’ll still know where everything is and how to access certain pages that you’re already using,” Jessica explains. “The biggest change is the ability to see all of your businesses and sales channels in a single view. We’ve basically added an umbrella over them, an account overview where you can see your different businesses and their sales channels in one clean interface with the option to click deeper into each.”
Other changes are related more to the configuration of your businesses rather than the look or functionality of the merchant console.
Each business within your account has its own business details, such as legal name, address, and phone number, and those details now apply to all of the sales channels underneath each business.
Team access is also managed at the business level. Whether you have one team (internal or external) that works across all of your brands or a separate team for each, you can set them up accordingly within each business. So after you’ve configured your team members’ permissions, they can see and manage any sales channel that’s attached to that business. If you grant them permissions across multiple businesses in your account, they can toggle between them. Your user profile is managed at the account level, but you can access it in the side menu or through the user icon in the top-right corner of any page.
Also in the side menu is the familiar “Get support” option to contact the Buy with Prime Merchant Support team. Submitting a ticket to get help, whether through live chat, a callback, or email, follows the same process, but you can now indicate whether the support ticket is a general question or related to one of the businesses or sales channels in your account.
With these configuration changes, there are slight changes in terminology that are important to keep in mind. What was previously called “Business account” is now “Businesses.” Again, because there’s now an umbrella linking all of your businesses, you can have one “account” with multiple “businesses.” “Sales channels” represents the channels where you’re offering Buy with Prime. “Integrations” are the different ways you’ve activated Buy with Prime on those sales channels (that is, on your site). Depending on your ecommerce provider, you can use the Buy with Prime buy-now or cart widgets or the Buy with Prime app for Shopify.
How does it work?
When you sign in to Buy with Prime, a new drop-down menu in the top right corner allows you to go to the account overview or switch to view a different business. You can view all of the businesses and sales channels that you have access to, both owned and shared.
Selecting a sales channel takes you to its merchant console home page that you’re already familiar with, where you can see that channel’s product catalog, customer list, orders and returns, analytics, and more. Selecting “See account overview” takes you to the account overview page where you can see all of your businesses and sales channels that offer Buy with Prime in a single view, and manage their details from there. You also have the option to add a new sales channel for one of your businesses directly from the account overview page.
From the account overview page, you can click “Manage settings” to view a specific business and manage and add sales channels, edit business details, and manage team members.
No matter where you land in the account overview, the merchant console is never far away. You can navigate back to any of your sales channels’ merchant console home pages using the drop-down menu in the top-right corner.
For more details about using the new account overview or instructions for setting up businesses and sales channels, go to the knowledge center.
Not yet a Buy with Prime merchant? Sign up today to offer Prime shopping benefits across all of your ecommerce sites.
*This data point measures the average increase in shoppers who placed an order when Buy with Prime was an available purchase option compared to when it wasn’t during the same time period.
**Data is from a sample of 14 merchants with average monthly website traffic between 10K to 1.5M. “New shoppers” means shoppers who hadn’t made a purchase on the merchant’s site since January 1, 2021 and completed a purchase using Buy with Prime.