Deako was a growing ecommerce brand that was already selling on Amazon.com, and saw the value of leveraging Amazon’s fulfillment services and reaching a valuable shopper audience in Prime members. However, the smart lighting company faced a common ecommerce challenge: Its direct-to-consumer (DTC) website wasn’t reaching its full potential. And the company’s head of ecommerce, Amie Hsu, had a feeling it was due to a subpar shopper experience, especially when it came to delivery.
With Deako’s warehouse in California and most of its customers in the Midwest and East Coast, expensive shipping costs and slow delivery times were hurting conversion rates on its site. Because of high 3PL fulfillment costs, Deako.com had a $200 minimum spend requirement for free shipping. Although this threshold helped push up Deako’s average order value (AOV)—through shoppers who completed their orders—it was also contributing to cart abandonment that hurt conversion rates.
Deako needed a solution that would help improve the fulfillment side of the shopper experience, without hampering AOV or units per order (UPO), another metric important to the company given its product category that often sees purchases in multiples. With a focus on driving high order value and units, Deako activated the Buy with Prime cart widget on 10 SKUs from its core collection. In initial A/B testing, the team saw a 17.1% increase in shopper conversion and a 46.2% increase in sales—double what Amie was expecting.
From there, Deako adopted the product recommendations and bundles features from Buy with Prime to encourage shoppers to add more to their carts—ultimately boosting AOV and UPO. “We want to encourage bigger basket building,” Amie emphasizes. “We want people to build out their entire home lighting system, rather than just onesie-twosie orders of light switches.” The results for those features were impressive too. After activating product recommendations, AOV for Buy with Prime orders increased 18%. And with bundles, Deako saw a record month, with a 112% unit increase month over month.
Converting shoppers with fast, free delivery
When Deako first started selling on Amazon, it was using Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM), which meant that it could maintain greater control over the fulfillment process, while tapping into a massive pool of shoppers. “Because we’re a smart home company, we wanted to track the types of units ordered and where they were shipped, so FBM allowed us to stay closer to that data,” Amie explains. “But with our 3PL warehouse in California, fulfilling orders ourselves meant we couldn’t meet the Prime delivery speed standards for customers in other parts of the country.”
Amie was confident that boosting delivery speeds and opening its product catalog to Prime members would help increase conversions and revenue, so the team ran a pilot with Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) on a few of its leading light switches. The results confirmed Amie’s thinking, so Deako moved all of its FBM inventory into FBA to let Amazon handle the storage, pick, packing, and shipping for its Amazon.com orders.
For its ecommerce site, where Deako was challenged with slow, costly fulfillment that was hurting business, Amie had similar thinking that ultimately led her to Buy with Prime. “I wanted to take advantage of Amazon’s fulfillment and delivery experience to provide a better experience for people who wanted to shop directly on our website,” she says. “I wanted to provide free and faster shipping for customers.”
On Deako.com shoppers can get free shipping on orders greater than $200, a high threshold given high 3PL fulfillment costs out of California. It’s this threshold that Amie believes caused some shoppers to abandon their carts. With Buy with Prime, Prime members can get free shipping and orders shipped as fast as one day on eligible Deako products. And the orders are fulfilled from the same FBA inventory that’s strategically distributed across fulfillment centers for Deako’s Amazon.com orders.
Using Buy with Prime allowed Deako to not only address the challenge of slow, costly fulfillment that was hurting conversions, but also reach a key shopper audience directly on its DTC site. The move proved beneficial in the same way it had for Deako’s Amazon.com presence . Buy with Prime contributed to a 17.1% increase in site conversions and a 46.2% increase in sales.
Inspiring cart building to drive AOV and UPO
Because Deako had historically high order values and its products were commonly purchased in multiples, the team wanted to continue driving AOV and UPO. They wanted to find ways to inspire shoppers to build out the Buy with Prime cart, so they started by activating product recommendations in the Buy with Prime checkout flow. The feature recommends other top-selling Buy with Prime products from Deako’s core light switch catalog and makes it easy for them to add additional products to the cart.
As hoped, activating product recommendations helped Deako boost AOV for Buy with Prime orders by 18%.
Deako was already having a lot of success with bundles on its Amazon Store and DTC site, so the team also activated Buy with Prime bundles to help drive units.
“I wanted to convey the value of a whole home lighting system, so I took the top-selling bundles from our site and created them for Buy with Prime with the products that were already in our FBA inventory,” Amie explains. “We launched security, ambience, and convenience starter kits. We also noticed in the order data that customers tended to buy the same switch over and over, so we created bundles with multiples of the switch.”
In the week after activating bundles, Deako saw a 187.5% increase in units compared to the previous week, and unit uplift has averaged 110.8% month-over-month since.
The order data that the team has been able to analyze to make product decisions is another aspect of Buy with Prime that Amie liked. Merchants that use Buy with Prime on their sites keep customer and order details that they can use for business decisions like Deako has, or for customer outreach and relationship building. So although Prime members sign in to their Amazon accounts to check out with Buy with Prime and Amazon fulfills the orders, Deako owns the entire brand experience.
“Amazon is one of the most trusted shopping experiences, with its easy checkout, fast and free shipping, hassle-free returns, and customer service,” Amie says, “so having all of that baked in to our site was a huge reason why I wanted to add Buy with Prime.”
The move ultimately helped Deako tackle its original ecommerce challenge, and push its ecommerce site to its full potential by giving customers the fast, free delivery they wanted—and the conversions that Amie and team wanted. With access to Amazon’s powerful fulfillment network and a key shopper audience, Buy with Prime provided the winning formula Deako needed to push its ecommerce site to its full potential.