When the team at Netrush sits down to help ecommerce brands scale and grow, each important decision ladders up to one question: What is it in service of? From investing more in marketing to expanding product SKUs on Amazon to optimizing logistics, they make sure to have a strong answer for that question before moving forward—whether it’s an initiative for another brand or for Netrush itself.
“When you think about what’s the next best action or where you’re going to spend your efforts, you have to understand what it’s in service of,” explains Chris Marantette, Co-Founder of Netrush, an ecommerce growth platform and agency. “When we understand with clarity what the highest-level goal is, we can make precise decisions in service of pulling the right levers.”
Although Netrush started 18 years ago with a focus on Amazon selling, today it has a robust set of solutions for ecommerce brands that are largely channel agnostic, including being a Buy with Prime Partner. When it comes to helping brands, the team wants to “turn dials and pull levers” that have a broader impact on a brand’s business.
“We bridge the gap between brands and their most valuable consumers by leveraging digital channels, and then applying our technology infrastructure to actually get it done,” says Raj Sapru, Head of Corporate Strategy at Netrush. “If we break down growth into fundamentals, like traffic and conversion and order value, every activity has the potential to move one of those dials in order to feed growth.”
How to scale an ecommerce business
Despite broad channel expertise, Netrush specializes in growth through Amazon, using both the online marketplace and other Amazon tools. For the past 18 years, “we just continued to lean into what Amazon was working on. What’s important to Amazon is a good thing to pay attention to,” says Chris. “And we found that the more we were open to what Amazon was working on, the more Amazon was open to inviting us to be part of it. It’s had a compounding effect that’s been really successful for us.”
One of those important things that Netrush knew to pay attention to was Buy with Prime. As Netrush was looking for more ways to help brands strengthen their omnichannel presence, Buy with Prime emerged to help brands expand their ecommerce businesses on channels beyond Amazon.com.
“We were broadening our thinking about direct-to-consumer, supply chains, and how the brand space was growing, and Buy with Prime was like a glue, a connection across all of that,” Chris says. “It made sense for us to lean into because it brought everything together in terms of this omnichannel sprawl.”
The Netrush team stresses the importance of an omnichannel approach if ecommerce businesses are looking to grow. “Consumers are changing and their shopping behaviors are changing,” Raj explains, “so an omnichannel approach means meeting shoppers where they are.”
Just like Amazon, Netrush is customer obsessed. So to help brands grow, the team had to shift from channel-centric thinking to customer-centric thinking—letting the customer decide how they want to shop, Raj says. “Brands say yes to us because they trust that we’re making decisions in service of their brand. If they understand the importance of being customer centric and letting the customer decide, then we now have an option for them if their customers decide that they want to use their Prime shopping benefits.”
Adds Katy Langston, Head of Performance Marketing & Ecommerce at Netrush, “If we’re truly customer centric, we want them to buy the way that they prefer to buy. Implementing Buy with Prime is in service of giving the customer their preferred channel and preferred method of conversion, which ultimately can increase a brand’s conversions.”
Buy with Prime drives new customers
For one of the brands that Netrush supports, Enzymedica, the team was exploring strategies to increase conversions on its ecommerce site. Although Enzymedica was seeing traffic to its site, conversions were lacking. Shoppers would go to Enzymedica.com to learn about the company’s popular digestive enzymes and health supplements but then buy the products on Amazon.com to get their Prime shopping benefits, like fast, free delivery and easy returns. Enzymedica saw that its customers were shopping across multiple channels and recognized the importance of staying connected to customers wherever they shopped.
So the natural health company tasked Netrush with helping unify its digital strategy. For that, Netrush looked to Buy with Prime.
“Shoppers were coming to Enzymedica.com to learn more directly from the brand, but they wanted the benefits of Amazon and their Prime membership,” Katy explains. “So Buy with Prime is this nice marriage of those two things that ultimately led those shoppers to become new customers.”
After Netrush added the Buy with Prime buy-now checkout to eligible SKUs on the site, Enzymedica saw an 81% increase in new-to-brand customers and a 34% increase in orders per visit. Furthermore, new customers grew at a faster rate than total customers after implementing Buy with Prime, with the share of customers new to the brand increasing 10.6 percentage points.
“The implementation of Buy with Prime has been transformative for us,” says Gary Kazmer, VP of Etail & Digital at Enzymedica. “It helped us not only streamline our digital strategy but also significantly increase our new-to-brand consumers. It’s a testament to the power and convenience of Buy with Prime.”
Although the initial goal—the in service of what—was to help increase shopper conversion, “the increase in new customers was a happy accident,” Katy says. “It was outside of our expectations that that many customers who used Buy with Prime would be net new.”
She wonders if those shoppers who came to Enzymedica.com to learn more would have still converted into those net-new customers if it was one ecommerce experience over the other—Amazon’s or the brand’s—instead of the merge of the two made possible through Buy with Prime. “Maybe some of that 81% would have, but not all,” she says. “Buy with Prime creates this symbiotic relationship between the two that really puts the customer first.”
Increase customer lifetime value
Another exciting result of Enzymedica using Buy with Prime has been an increase in repeat customers. Katy and the team are tracking and analyzing how customers are coming back to the site and reordering more product, some through Buy with Prime (Enzymedica has since added Buy with Prime cart) and others through the brand’s subscription option. Although Buy with Prime doesn’t support subscriptions, Chris believes that even when return customers choose the subscription option, it still shows the value of Buy with Prime—its potential impact on customer lifetime value.
“It’s a strong balancing act that Amazon is managing,” he explains. “If the whole intent was to get shoppers to buy on Amazon, there wouldn’t be any more Buy with Prime adoption. If a brand doesn’t get that larger, recurring customer lifetime value, they wouldn’t justify Buy with Prime.”
Adds Raj, “Buy with Prime helps us move several levers in service of something greater that a brand is trying to accomplish. Sometimes it’s conversion, sometimes it’s new customers, and sometimes it’s in service of long-term sustainable profit and increasing the lifespan of a customer.”
Learn more about Netrush and Buy with Prime.