Meet the merchant
Gabb.com
Industry: Technology – smartphones and watches
Company founded: 2019
Sales channels: Amazon.com, Gabb.com
Site traffic: >500,000/month
Annual revenue: $1M-10M
Activated Buy with Prime: October 2023
Buy with Prime features active: Buy with Prime cart and API, promotions, Meta and Google Pixels
Share of site orders through Buy with Prime: 30%
In search of trust and value
When Gabb launched in 2019, it was built on a mission to protect kids and connect families through safe smart phones and watches. To achieve this, it needed to help parents feel confident about its products. Gabb accomplished this by not only creating innovative products that truly protect and connect kids and their families, but also using its brand site to educate parents and give them a positive shopping experience.
Similarly, as Gabb expanded, it was looking to partner with companies it could feel confident about. The team sought out services and solutions it could trust that were both good for Gabb’s customers and good for the business. “Our goal is to be the safer solution for parents and their kids—from contacts to apps to content—we want to be a safer solution in every way,” says Dani Strong, Director of Marketplaces for Gabb. “So with that as our focus, the kids as our focus, we only want to work with companies that share similar values. And that starts at the top and trickles down, from our manufacturer and other contractors to our in-house software developers and each one of us. We don’t want to work with anything or anyone that we feel could jeopardize our customers’ trust. We want the parents and their children to feel like we did our due diligence every step of the way.”
In October 2023, Gabb added Buy with Prime to products on its ecommerce site to offer Prime members a shopping experience that they trust directly on its site, while optimizing fulfillment so the growing ecommerce brand could keep up with its shoppers’ expectations.
“The biggest reason why we wanted Buy with Prime on our site—and why our shoppers choose to check out with Buy with Prime today—is for the shipping speed and efficiency,” Dani explains, noting that through Gabb’s own fulfillment of orders placed on its site, the average customer gets their package in about 5-7 days. “When our shoppers are offered two options to check out, they see Buy with Prime, with Prime being a brand that they already trust and associate with free two-day shipping. So I think that’s the biggest selling point and why we’ve loved having it on our site.”
Since the addition, Gabb has seen a reduction in its overall costs for fulfillment and customer service. It has also seen a 45% increase in shopper conversion that has contributed to a 25% revenue uplift, with $1.4 million in revenue growth attributable to Buy with Prime. But more than that, Buy with Prime has helped Gabb deliver an even better shopping experience for the parents who want great products from trustworthy brands for their kids.
“I’m enthusiastic about Buy with Prime because it has delivered substantial results for our business. We’ve seen a significant revenue increase, reduced customer service costs, and a positive impact from social ads. The overall return on investment has been exceptional.”
In Gabb’s own words
In an exclusive Q&A, Dani dives into the details on why Buy with Prime continues to be a good return on investment (ROI) for Gabb.
What are Gabb’s business goals for 2024?
We have a close eye on profitability right now as we look to grow, so we’re trying to be as efficient as possible, like with operating costs and marketing spend, for example. But another goal is to bring more customers into the Gabb family—specifically, we hope to double our orders from last year. That’s a lofty goal! We’re okay taking a hit on profit margins upfront because the nature of our product means our customers typically have a contract of 6-24 months or more. So it’s really about widening our funnel pretty massively and bringing them into our family.
What did your business’s costs consist of before adopting Buy with Prime?
For orders through our native checkout on our ecommerce site, we have our own warehouse pretty close to headquarters where we fulfill those orders ourselves. For Amazon.com orders, obviously Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) handles those. Fulfillment through FBA is actually cheaper than it is for our own ecommerce site because FBA’s shipping rates are much lower than we can get.
Customer service is a cost we have for orders placed on our site. Currently we use a blend of 60% in house customer service and 40% outsourced. Of that 60% in house, we have a very large team dedicated to providing customer service. We’re trying to flip that over the next year, though, and actually outsource even more.
Has Buy with Prime or any of its features helped reduce or eliminate those costs?
Right out the gate the fees are lower. Even though FBA is cheaper than our in-house order fulfillment, using Buy with Prime is even cheaper than FBA when considering the total cost of fulfillment. So we save a lot on that side.
Then another part that has been really great is Buy with Prime Assist helping our customers with any Buy with Prime orders. So we’re not paying for those customer service headcounts; we don’t have that hitting our books. To have that already included in the Prime service fee, and not something that we have to pay extra for, is a nice luxury in a way. And you can extrapolate that percentage-wise. If you consider that 30% of our site orders go through Buy with Prime, that’s 30% of our site customers that are being helped completely by Amazon.
Discover how you can drive revenue growth with Buy with Prime.
What quantitative results have you seen since adding Buy with Prime to your site?
Just in the first week of putting it on our site, we noticed a 20-30% increase in shopper conversion. However, after continuing to iterate and adopt more Buy with Prime features, we conducted another A/B test and saw a 45% increase in conversions.
In efforts to drive shoppers from social media channels to the Buy with Prime products on our site, our paid social manager conducted A/B testing where she compared static ads that included Buy with Prime and those that didn’t. In the test, she saw a double-digit increase in click-through rate (CTR) and then a subsequent 7% increase in sales from those click-throughs. This just validates the brand presence of Buy with Prime, adding that value to our social ads when we did that test. And even if those customers don’t convert right away, we can remarket to them and get them in the funnel. On a lot of the platforms, if you have a healthier CTR, you get a better ad score and so there’s a ripple effect there.
Any qualitative results that you’ve seen? Anything that has shown you the value of Buy with Prime but might not have a metric attached to it?
One of the things that I think about right off the bat is trust. Any site that I’m on, whether it’s a big well-known brand or even if it’s one I haven’t seen before, if I see Buy with Prime on it, I just feel so much more confident. Especially because Amazon Prime is known for its fast shipping and great return policy, I feel very protected as a customer. So shopping on these sites, I know Amazon is going to take care of me because they’re partnering with the company in a way. I think the customer feels that trust.
Let’s walk through the math behind the return Gabb saw from Buy with Prime.
We saw a strong revenue uplift of 25% from using Buy with Prime, totaling $1.4 million in incremental revenue. And the 7% increase in sales from the stronger social ads campaign contributed $2,800 to that revenue uplift. On the operations side, because Buy with Prime Assist is handling customer service for our Buy with Prime orders, we’ve seen savings of about $15,000. All in, our costs for activating Buy with Prime on our site totaled $79,800. So subtracting those costs from our revenue uplift, net proceeds growth attributable to Buy with Prime is about $1.3 million.
Numbers aside, what value do you see in Buy with Prime?
Even if the numbers didn’t come back strong for us, it wouldn’t matter. With what we’ve gained, even just anecdotally in this relationship, we would take that over anything. I think if you talk to anybody at Gabb who has any hint of experience with Buy with Prime, they’re going to say, “Yes, we’re so glad we did that. From my realm and this realm and that realm, here’s how it has positively affected each of us.” It’s definitely a good word over here. We’re so glad we implemented it.
To learn how Buy with Prime might be a good investment for your ecommerce business, check out the Buy with Prime ROI calculator.