HOW-TO Amazon Buy with Prime - Everything You Need To Know About BwP

Today, I'm going to talk about my experience with Amazon Buy with Prime (BwP). If you're not familiar with BwP, it's an Amazon buy now button, but on you're own DTC website to help increase conversion rate.

Unfortunately, not everyone is doing this because...

• they don't know about it
• think it's difficult to implement and
• frankly, don't want to drive traffic away from their website.

Let's tackle this and I'll tell you why you must test this out. Here's a quick breakdown of what I'm about to discuss.

What is Buy with Prime

DTC's biggest challenge: Driving Traffic to Amazon

Advantages of Using Buy with Prime

How to implement Buy with Prime

Four Buy with Prime Advertising Options

BwP: Inside Look

Summary

What is Buy with Prime

There is a new (Q2 2022) program called Buy with Prime that allows DTC stores to add a "Buy with Prime" button to their store, which enables Amazon.com to provide the same fast, free delivery and checkout experience that they offer on their website, offering the same Prime shopping benefits. You can place this button below any current "buy now" button on your store (e.g. WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce).

DTC biggest challenge: Driving Traffic to Amazon

Unfortunately, most companies don't want to drive traffic away from their store. That makes sense because you pay for Google and Facebook advertising, hire influencers, build out your blog content and schedule social media posts to drive traffic to your website which will typically convert between 1-3%, according to Bigcommerce and previous experience. Sidebar: this means, for every 100 shoppers you drive to your website, only 1-3 will buy. On top of that Shopify is pushing back on Amazon’s one-click checkout service, noted in CNBC article and indicated that they won't be responsible for any issues with fraud or returns.

Advantages of Using Buy with Prime

I understand why some companies do not want to drop a BwP button on their website. Did you lose a significant amount of revenue when you added Amazon to your omnichannel strategy? Most likely not. I cannot understate the importance of moving fast, testing and trying something out before you say no. Some reasons why I am using Buy with Prime.

1. Year-to-date, the average CVR for Amazon sellers is about 13.18% vs. your DTC website's 1-3% CVR.
2. There are about 200+ million (2021) Amazon Prime subscribers that are familiar with and trust the shopping experience, Prime shopping, and free returns. If you have a small brand, a great way to leverage Amazon's Prime members.
3. Ease of implementation. Amazon's technical implementation team implemented the Buy with Prime solution on my Shopify site within 30 minutes, more details are below - but Russell Baker and Sharon Gee announced a new partnership with Bigcommerce, making this self-service integration even easier.
4. Unlike FBA/FBM where you don't have access to their contact information, using Buy with Prime you get access to your customer's email address!
5. [Updated 1/10/2023] New capability of displaying Amazon customer reviews on your website. 
6. Replaces your old "Buy on Amazon" button, which goes to your Amazon PDP with ads from your competitors (or maybe you don't want to if you're using the brand referral program).

How to implement Buy with Prime

Here are the 6 steps to add Buy with Prime to your website with an Inside Look video below.

Step 1: Requirements to offer Buy with Prime on your DTC Site

Let's cover what we need to enable BwP on your own DTC site.

1. If you don't have access, join the interest list here.  [Updated 1/10/23] Amazon just announced that Buy with Prime will be available to open to U.S. Sellers on 1/31/2023.
2. You'll need a Professional Seller Central account
3. Use Amazon's fulfillment service, FBA.
4. Active e-commerce site.

Step 2: BwP Installation Process

So how difficult is this to install this on your storefront? Not difficult at all and you do not have to be technical. Let's briefly go over what you need during the setup. Go through their Getting Started activation center on BwP. Your Amazon Business Development representative will walk you through every step. If you're doing this on your own, easy online tutorials to follow. It will walk you through setting up your business information, and typical business information to set up your account. You'll need a link to your privacy policy and terms & conditions URLs.

Step 3: Generate a code snippet.

This is a short script to add to your DTC website. Amazon should provide instructions based on the e-commerce platform you're using. This is usually just one code snippet to one template file, but if you have multiple custom template files, make sure you add to those as well.

Step 4: Import your Amazon products to BwP catalog

Use an import button and then toggle the "Offer Prime" column. Product SKUs on your DTC website must match with Buy with Prime SKUs

Step 5: Amazon Pay

As part of the activation process, you must use Amazon Pay to accept payments - similar to using Stripe or Braintree on your direct-to-consumer website. It's a matter of going to your Settings > Payments and activating your Amazon Pay.

Step 6: Tax settings

Set up your taxes (you can do this at a later time).

That's it. You should be live immediately and see BwP on your product page after steps 1-4 above.

Four Buy with Prime Advertising Options

Let's talk about driving traffic to your website.

Option 1: Sponsored Brands

If you know me, I love talking about Amazon advertising. What immediately drove me to install the Buy with Prime option is the ability to create Sponsored Brand campaigns from Amazon to your DTC website. What I didn't know is that this program is in closed beta, invite-only for non-variant products. That means if you have products with parent-child relationships, it won't work at the moment. Here are some alternative advertising options for Buy with Prime.

Option 2: Amazon DSP

Amazon DSP is a demand-side platform that allows you to programmatically buy ads to reach audiences on and off Amazon. It has Self-service and managed-service options available. Amazon DSP is available to both advertisers who sell products on Amazon and those who do not.

Option 3: Amazon Display Ads

Amazon Display Ads is available only to merchants offering Buy with Prime on their e-commerce site and with an agency that can support this option. This is not the same as Amazon DSP.

In addition, not related to advertising, but you'll have your own Amazon BwP Storefront with just BwP products.

Option 4: Non-Amazon Advertising Options

If Amazon DSP or Display Ads is not an option, you can start/continue with Google & Meta (Facebook) advertising, email, blogging, and other DTC traffic strategies. By the way, you can add Meta Pixel Id so that you can send your Buy with Prime order information back to Meta for attribution, tracking the full funnel.

BwP: Inside Look

Here's an inside look at my Buy with Prime console.

Summary

I have a formula that I reference (more on that in the future) before I consider implementing anything. The Buy with Prime program would fall under improving conversion rate and if you have a low-converting website with no brand recognition, this will help. It's like having social proof or a trust badge on your site. 

My working hypothesis, I think Amazon Buy with Prime will increase conversion rates on your website because most e-commerce websites have a <3% CVR.  Now, add the With about 6o minutes of implementation time, it's worth the add or A/B testing. 

[Updated 1/10/2023] Amazon's indicated Buy with Prime can help increase conversion rate by up to 25% on average.

Comment below if you're using Buy with Prime or Amazon Display Ads. I would love to hear about your experience.