One of the most important things we obsess over is how you can use Buy with Prime to deliver a Prime shopping experience on your own website, with fast, free shipping, transparent delivery times, and a checkout experience trusted by millions of shoppers.
Our goal is to make the experience recognizable to shoppers when they’re seeing it for the first time on your website. We want the Buy with Prime experience to live up to the expectation shoppers have when they see the Prime brand.
The Prime logo and delivery estimate sends a trust signal to shoppers. This trust gives shoppers more confidence to try Buy with Prime when they see it in a new context with a brand they might not have purchased from before.
The business value of trust
Trust is an important element to creating a thriving online brand, and getting the user experience (UX) right is critical to establishing trust. Things like copy typos, misaligned text, too many pop-up ads, and disorganized website navigation can degrade shopper trust in your brand.
When designing our own UX we think about how we can help customers focus on the content that matters on the page through an intentional use of white space, clear page hierarchy, and consistent alignment of text and visuals. We’ve learned that using familiar UX patterns shoppers experience on other websites helps them to more quickly understand how to navigate and interact with our web pages. You can apply the same thinking to your ecommerce site.
When considering how to showcase Buy with Prime products on your own site, transparency is important. To earn shopper trust and expectations, you need to help them understand how Buy with Prime works, their options for returns, and the importance of offering transparent delivery estimates.
These trust signals extend beyond the web. Shoppers want to be kept in the loop, so sending them order confirmation emails with tracking links can also increase their confidence in your brand. Further, if they run into issues with their order, following up with a resolution email shows them that you are committed to their needs as a customer.
Applying the shopper lens
It’s a best practice to look at your product pages from the eyes of a shopper. This lens helps you identify gaps in your UX. For example, merchants typically offer Buy with Prime as a purchase option on their product detail pages (PDPs).
So, with your shopper hat on, ask yourself “is it easy to understand the shipment options available using Buy with Prime vs. other checkout options?” How you structure the design elements in relation to each other on the same page can have a big impact on how shoppers process their options.
Making the checkout experience as direct and seamless as possible is a key way to earn shopper trust. Most shoppers want to complete their purchase with minimal effort and time; they don’t like friction.
When designing Buy with Prime, our primary goal was finding ways to save shoppers time throughout the checkout experience. One of the key benefits Buy with Prime offers is giving shoppers the option to use their default address and payment method that are housed in their Amazon account when they check out using Buy with Prime.
We also apply a critical eye to what information is surfaced on the checkout review page. We’ve tried to keep the information limited to what shoppers need to review before making their purchase, because it helps reduce distractions and focuses their attention before clicking the buy button.
Understanding the Buy with Prime customer experience guidelines
To help you get the most out of adding Buy with Prime to your ecommerce site, we’ve developed a set of guidelines to help you deliver a memorable and trustworthy customer experience. Below are answers to four questions I’ve received from both internal partners and brands about to how to create a Buy with Prime experience shoppers will love.
Q: How will these design principles help drive more shopper awareness and purchases using Buy with Prime on my ecommerce site?
A: One of the top reasons shoppers abandon checkout is because of high extra costs, such as for shipping. By offering Buy with Prime, you’re providing a path for shoppers to purchase your products without surprising fees or unexpected shipping costs getting in the way. Outside of fast, free delivery, Buy with Prime also gives shoppers more confidence to make the purchase because they know they’ll have support in case something goes wrong with their order. Buy with Prime has been shown to increase shopper conversion by 25% on average*. By offering Buy with Prime, you make it easier for shoppers to start engaging with your brand and purchasing more of your products.
Q: What are some tips to offer a more accessible and inclusive site experience?
A: Accessibility means that everyone who uses a product or service can receive the same benefit, regardless of any condition or disability that they might have. We believe that good products are usable by everyone, and are in fact made better for everyone when we take accessibility into account.
For example, using high contrast interfaces helps customers use them in bright sunlight, or to understand them at a quick glance, as well as providing accessibility to customers with visual impairments. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 15% of the world population has a significant disability – over 1 billion people. If this population were its own country, it would be the third largest in the world, behind India and China. By making your online experiences more accessible, you can expand the reach of your brand to a broader group of customers.
There are a lot of factors that go into making your site accessible, but some key things to think about are using enough contrast, making all the content on your site operable with a keyboard, and providing alternative text for images so that customers with visual and certain cognitive disabilities can still consume your content. At Amazon, we also look at how we make our site copy readable and understandable by using language that is concise and direct, with font sizes large enough to read. A good resource to start with is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Q: Shoppers, especially Prime members, have come to expect transparency from the brands they purchase from. How can I deliver a Buy with Prime checkout experience that offers more transparency for shoppers?
A: Our Buy with Prime research team conducted a shopper experience study between November 2022 and February 2023 with 40 shoppers across the US who had made a purchase from an ecommerce retailer within the past four weeks. During the interviews with shoppers, we asked about their end-to-end shopping journey and what they prioritized most on the sites from which they made a purchase. That study found that shoppers care most about:
- Learning about the product from people like them (that is, people who look like them or have similar interests and experiences)
- Knowing they are getting a good deal
- Tracking their purchased item’s progress
- Knowing a product is as good as it’s described
- Understanding their return and purchase coverage options
- Supporting businesses that match their personal values
- Making it convenient to get and receive their product
- Learning more about a brand
- Controlling what information they share
- Ensuring that the company is legitimate
It’s a best practice to add features or messaging to your site that addresses these shopper motivations.
For example, Buy with Prime helps shoppers understand their return and purchase coverage options (all purchases are covered by the Amazon Pay A-to-z Guarantee), while giving them control over the information they share by using the information stored in their Amazon account. You can add a return policy page with information about how Buy with Prime returns work so that shoppers are fully informed before making a purchase.
The Buy with Prime Reviews from Amazon feature addresses shoppers’ preference to learn about products from people like themselves. With this feature, you can add hard-earned customer reviews from your Amazon.com store directly on your site. This form of social proof both increases shopper confidence and helps them validate that the product is as good as described. Reviews from Amazon offers a transparent way for shoppers to more deeply understand your products and brand from people they can relate to.
Shoppers have also mentioned wanting to learn more about the brand directly. When shoppers discover a new brand, they want to verify that it’s a company they can trust. Help your shoppers understand and connect with your brand by including an about us page, and be transparent and descriptive about details like materials, manufacturing process, company values, and your philosophy for engaging with customers.
Get more insights about ways to optimize your site to build shopper trust in this report.
Finally, it’s a best practice to include FAQs about Buy with Prime on your website. As a new offering for ecommerce businesses, your site might be the first-time that shoppers discover Buy with Prime, so giving them some frequently asked questions and answers can help them better understand what to expect with the service.
Q: As more merchants adopt Buy with Prime, what is the one piece of advice you’d offer them to get the most out of using the service?
A: To get the most out of Buy with Prime, consider the holistic journey of a shopper on your website. A shopper’s journey often begins much sooner than arriving on your ecommerce site or product pages.
Consider asking yourself some questions such as: How are shoppers discovering your brand and products before they get to your site? How are they engaging with your brand on social media? Have you offered Buy with Prime on enough products on your website to engage shoppers? How do they discover your Buy with Prime products after they’re on your site? By thinking about the purchase experience and the journey to get there, you can help shoppers better connect with your brand and discover more products to love on your site.
To truly understand the value of Buy with Prime and the impact it can have on conversions, testing is a good tactic to employ. We’ve worked with many early adopters to help them run A/B tests where they test two versions – a control group and a test group – of a user experience to see which one performs better to achieve a given business goal. It’s important to think of A/B testing as an ongoing, iterative effort to find the best UX for shoppers.
Kim Lewis is a Principal UX Designer for Buy with Prime.
Learn more about Buy with Prime.
*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.