Secret Shopping Buy With Prime: 2023 Comprehensive Review of Buy With Prime And Where It Needs to Go Next
There is a lot of noise about Buy with Prime, and will it disrupt the Direct to Consumer industry generally. Others go further and wonder if Amazon can do an “end-run” around Shopify by leveraging its massive Prime install base and fulfillment. Surprisingly over a month after launch, I see many people commenting on Buy With Prime without trying it out themselves using a representative sample.
This article is about the strengths and weaknesses of Buy With Prime in its current state. How does it help brands and where can it improve?
Too Long; Didn’t Read
In the final analysis, Amazon Buy With Prime from a customer’s perspective looks more like an enhanced marketplace experience than an enhanced DTC experience. It’s also not clear to me that Amazon can close this gap without the help of the platforms themselves.
And this means Shopify.
What Companies Did You Select to Shop for and Why?
If you are going to “secret-shop” Amazon Buy With Prime, my logic was simple: let’s go to Amazon’s testimonials first. My strong suspicion was that executing this hybrid DTC/marketplace experience would be more difficult than expected, even for the company’s featured case studies. (It turns out we were right)
If the company can’t deliver a home-run experience for its featured case studies, what hope do the rest of us have? If Amazon can deliver a superior experience for a small set of stores, it has a chance of gaining traction.
We chose to buy from four stores listed on Buy With Prime’s Merchant Testimonials Page:
The other store listed on the merchant page sold larger items that would be difficult to return, so they were excluded from this analysis. The first thing you notice about these is that none of them are common, household names. What this tells me is that the companies kicking the tires on Amazon’s Buy With Prime program are smaller businesses who are early adopters.
Another thing you quickly notice about these 4 case studies is that they are all Shopify stores!
What is Buy With Prime?
Amazon introduced Buy With Prime as a way for shoppers and merchants to extend their Prime benefits to their own online stores. This increases the value of a Prime membership by offering fast, free shipping, a seamless checkout experience, and free returns to participating merchants.
The easiest way to describe Buy With Prime is what would happen if Amazon Pay and Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) had a baby? Signing up for both is a prerequisite for Buy With Prime.
For Amazon, the benefits are:
Get more usage from Amazon Pay and Fulfillment by Amazon.
Add more items to the Amazon Prime program.
Capture buyers who shop on websites other than Amazon for particular items.
For merchants, the benefits are:
Faster, more reliable fulfillment.
Shipment promise dates provided by Amazon.
Grow your DTC sales by driving traffic from Amazon with their Sponsored Brands program.
What is the Purchase Flow for Buy With Prime?
Products that offer Buy With Prime will include a Buy With Prime button from a Product’s detail page that you can click and be led to a checkout page (after signing into your amazon account). You can edit your shipping address and payment information directly from this page. Once everything is set, you click place order and be sent to an order confirmation screen.
I’ve recorded a video here that shows the flow. One unexpected item was an interstitial screen in between the product detail page and the checkout process to agree to Amazon’s privacy policy.
That’s right, every buyer who goes through this process must agree to Amazon’s privacy policy, which could be completely different than your privacy policy as a merchant.
This interstitial screen takes several seconds to load. For buyers, every second counts, and I was disappointed to see this screen. I understand that Amazon needs to set up the cart and receive the data, but it needs to get faster.
Amazon Buy With Prime Order Screen
What is the Customer’s Experience like?
The following table shows the order experience of each Buy With Prime merchant, and when each e-mail was received and from who.
What are the Red Flags about Amazon Buy With Prime Direct to Consumer?
We tracked all emails received by both Amazon and the brand during our purchase experiences. Here’s where the wheels started to come off.
In only one of the four merchants did we get a single e-mail from the brand itself during the entire purchase experience, which is from Epic Water Filters a full two days after the purchase! No typical trigger or customer relationship e-mails were generated from any brands we purchased from.
We received e-mails from both Amazon Pay and BuyWithPrime.Amazon.Com (not a typical Amazon e-mail) during the post-purchase experience.
All e-mails were only Amazon-branded and did not contain any upsells.
Even the one branded e-mail we did get from Epic Water Filters was horrific. It told us as a buyer that an account was created for us and we needed to reset our password. Welcome to the brand! I guess, thanks for nothing? From a technology point of view, it’s clear that was the point our record was imported into the brand’s CRM database — but poorly.
What this tells me is that the standard, out of the box Buy With Prime integration does not make it simple to create a typical, branded Direct to Consumer experience.
We’ll come back to this later.
How Did The Different Merchants Fare In Their Buyer Experience?
In half of the case study accounts, it was not easy to find Buy With Prime items to shop from — although we admit that this can differ on a daily basis.
The delivery experience was terrific in all cases, as you might expect. This is what Amazon is great at.
The return experience was horrific. Quite often neither the merchant nor Amazon knew what to do next. For one of these merchants, we are still waiting on guidance to this day.
In short, Amazon Buy With Prime is not the “A to Z Guarantee” you have come to expect from Amazon.
What eCommerce Platforms are Used by the Top Buy With Prime Brands?
All stores used Shopify on their website. This is interesting because of a well-publicized partnership between Amazon and BigCommerce. In a situation where no brand names you’ve heard of have implemented Buy With Prime yet, it’s curious that this would be the case.
How Was the Delivery Experience?
The delivery experience for all orders was easy and efficient. All products came within two days with no issues. Delivery speed and promises for Fulfillment by Amazon on a Direct to Consumer order worked as advertised.
How Was the Packaging? A Picture Says a Thousand Words
Packaging was a huge miss for all brands involved. The Live by BEING product was not very well packaged. Bath salts in a glass bottle came in one of the plastic Amazon packages and once opened the lid was coming off. However, the Epic Water Filters product came in an Amazon box with customized packaging.
Each package from Buy With Prime is as if you are ordering from Amazon directly.
Packaging Comparison
As part of our tests, we made one purchase from Being through their normal DTC website, and compared that packaging to the Buy With Prime purchase.
As you can see, the brand packaging is much more customized on-brand ordered directly through the website using a normal “Add to Cart” rather than “Buy With Prime.”
This is one of the most significant weaknesses of the Buy With Prime offering. If I’m a buyer and see packaging like this, why wouldn’t I buy the next purchase on Amazon instead?
I’m not getting the premium brand experience anyway.
In this case, a picture really does say a thousand words.
How Does the Return Experience Work?
Amazon and the merchants do not seem to have a proper return experience set in place. In some cases, it was relatively easy. I contacted each merchant and only 2 out of the 4 gave me clear instructions on how the return process should be handled. Turkish Homes, for example, immediately sent me a PDF with return instructions and a return mailing label attached. Epic Water Filters sent me an address for returns.
On the other hand, Gentle Living and Live By Being did not seem to know how to handle returns of items purchased through Buy With Prime. The customer representative for Gentle Living was very communicative and helpful but had to take time to investigate how to handle the matter. She told me to contact Amazon Customer Service, which I did. Once I was on the phone with them, they were seemingly unable to find my orders. After being transferred two times, I spoke with a representative from Amazon Pay. He told me that he would contact the merchants directly and if they did not respond within 48 hours, I could contact them again and they will file a claim to have the order refunded. In the words of the representative, “We do not care about the items, we just care about what you paid.”
Underwhelming and essentially broken is how I would describe the returns process.
What are the Best Parts of the Buy With Prime Experience?
The checkout experience was easy. Once you click the Buy With Prime button, you are immediately taken to the checkout page. From there, you can place your order utilizing the payment method saved on your Amazon account. You are then taken to a confirmation page after purchasing. There is an interstitial page, but I do understand the need to log in to my Amazon account. This is no different than Paypal or other third-party payment providers.
Delivery Speed. Buy With Prime was significantly faster than the brand’s shipping process. I received a Buy With Prime package seven days quicker than a standard package, despite ordering the regular package a day earlier. In short, this was a great experience.
What Are the Worst Parts of the Buy With Prime Experience?
Visibility. It isn’t easy to find your order in Amazon after it is placed. You have to go to Amazon Payments to see your transaction. It does not show up in your normal order history. Amazon Pay is in another tab, a click away. How would you even think to go there?
Packaging. I think there should be an opportunity for the brand to customize its packaging when using Buy With Prime. Perhaps, use its packaging inside an Amazon box?
Returns. The worst experience overall. Neither Amazon or the merchants seem to know a proper method to handling returns of items purchased through Buy With Prime.
What Single Company Has Implemented Buy With Prime the Best?
Epic Water Filters. They have a page specifically for Buy With Prime products and each product page includes the buy with prime button. It’s easy to find the buy with prime page since it is listed on the drop down menu of the navigation bar.
The site itself is great.
BEING has a similar set up but the products listed on the page do not have the Buy With Prime Button.
What Changes Does Amazon Need to Make with Buy With Prime?
Amazon should increase the visibility of products ordered through Buy With Prime. For an average consumer, it is near impossible to figure out where your order is on Amazon. It does not show up on the order page at all. The only place the orders are listed is under the Amazon Pay section. Perhaps, Amazon should create a Buy With Prime orders section?
Amazon should also think about becoming more connected with the brands that offer Buy With Prime. After receiving the non-Buy With Prime BEING product, I was surprised to see the difference in packaging quality. The one from Amazon was simply the product wrapped in plastic and placed in the package. The other was in a customized BEING bag and placed in a pink mailer. I think the opportunity to keep brand-customizable packaging would be a plus.
Finally, the e-mail post-purchase touchpoints left a lot to be desired. Amazon and not the brand itself sent almost every e-mail I received.
In short, this means that integrations with companies like Klaviyo, Gorgias, and Zendesk need to happen, like tomorrow. Did I mention ChannelAdvisor too? How else do they expect larger brands to adopt?
Can Amazon Advance Buy With Prime Without Shopify’s Help?
After a lot of consideration, I am forced to answer no.
What Amazon has done so far is prove that it is possible to deliver a streamlined purchase and delivery experience using Amazon services on a third-party website. Mission accomplished. Practically, however, it feels like a prototype user experience rather than one that is ready to scale. If every consumer had my experience, I can’t imagine this will scale faster than Amazon Pay in its current form. After all, it’s more complex to interact with for the buyer, and more difficult for the merchant to adopt and maintain.
Shopify is the platform of record and has its own Terms of Service. Amazon has its own Terms of Service. That handoff will always be a little tricky. Other large companies like Mailchimp have tried to route around Shopify’s data policies, and were forced to back down. Later, Mailchimp and Shopify made up.
I’m left wondering, what’s in it for Shopify to play ball?
Wrapping Up
The idea for this article was pretty simple: why hasn’t anyone written yet based on an actual Buy With Prime shopping experience? I was shocked that for all the commentary on the release, this simple step had not yet been taken. To remedy this, I shopped almost all of Amazon’s own featured merchants. I couldn’t pick a bigger softball slow pitch.
Even then, the results were uneven at best.
To be sure, Amazon has a big challenge in front of it. When creating the Buy With Prime program, Amazon had to make several significant bets.
How prominently do we feature the Amazon brand versus the merchant’s brand?
Do we focus primarily on fulfillment or payments?
How do we communicate the Prime promise?
How can merchants use Buy With Prime to build their own eCommerce business?
How easy can we make the integration?
Overall, I would say that Amazon has so far answered most of the questions from the point of view of Amazon’s marketplace experience, rather than a typical Direct to Consumer experience.
“Buy With Prime feels more to me like as a brand you have signed up for Amazon Marketplace unknowingly, rather than Amazon being a shipping and payment offering on your Direct to Consumer website.”
For a brand that cares about controlling its customer data and end-to-end experience, that is probably the most damning critique there is.
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