Adoption Is All That Matters In Amazon's Buy With Prime Announcement

Adoption Is All That Matters In Amazon's Buy With Prime Announcement

Having been in the software business my whole life, I can say for sure that the power of defaults cannot be underestimated. Recently, many people have seen the power of defaults in the advertising business (FB/Apple) but there are many examples in software beyond this.

The core of Amazon's problem is simple:

Without controlling an eCommerce platform, Amazon is essentially left convincing others to sign up -- see BigCommerce in the announcement. However, supporting Buy With Prime on a platform is different than it being the default.

Without it being the default, Amazon is fighting hand to hand combat for each and every user with agencies and brands.

The lowest hanging fruit is existing FBA Sellers, but even they have to configure it to get the benefit. Should be simple Javascript, but simple does not mean adoption.

Amazon Pay relative to other payment methods has been a relative failure in the industry, despite everyone having an Amazon wallet. On its own, without extra incentives from Amazon, even if Buy with Prime is 3-5x better, it's still relatively a failure compared to the default payment method of a platform -- particularly in a platform like Shopify with a strong point of view on payment defaults (that are not going to change).

3-5x current Amazon Pay usage is a failure in Amazon's eyes. Don't forget that.

People forget -- the ultimate incentive in eCommerce is not conversion, it's traffic. Something like 75-85% of Amazon sellers use FBA in some form or fashion. So that gives you some tailwinds immediately.

But to take full advantage of that, you need not just benefits -- you need what's called a "burning platform."

It's the difference between a vitamin and an aspirin. One you MUST TAKE to stop pain, and the other you SHOULD TAKE because it should help out. (VCs talk about this in funding pitches too).

What's a burning platform in eCommerce? It's not conversion. (which it surprised me Amazon didn't publish lift numbers yet -- perhaps it may in the future ).

The only true burning platform in eCommerce is traffic. It's the ultimate carrot. In other words, if I do not install this thing, I am reducing my traffic by 10% compared to my competition.

I bring this up because Amazon has not yet announced the true tie-in between Amazon's Marketplace TRAFFIC and Buy with Prime itself.

If Amazon committed to surfacing Buy With Prime listings on Amazon automatically in some way, perhaps through your brand storefront, that could be big. If Amazon automatically entered Buy With Prime listings into a free tier of Amazon Advertising, that could be another idea.

Perhaps a tie-in with brand registry.

Whatever it will be (and it will be something, because Amazon is all-in here) we have yet to see the traffic "shoe" drop on this program yet.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of adoption when evaluating Buy With Prime, because I am sure Amazon is not.