The transformative power of the Buy with Prime button from Amazon can’t be underestimated. For Amazon it is clearly going to take its power from the ‘confines’ of its marketplace and out into the rest of the internet, taking it where it has always wanted to go: on to merchant sites.
For the marketplace it also takes its growing dominance of ecommerce to the next level. For many of the retailers and brands that use Amazon, there has always been the ambition to break out from the marketplace and own the customer on their own site. This has long been a thorn in Amazon’s side.
Not any more. Now where ever those customers go, so to does Amazon – well, Prime at least.
But its no bad thing for retailers either. Smaller brands and retailers can leverage their relationship with Amazon to help drive customers to their sites using the lure of Buy with Prime. Prime members trust Prime and they like the advantages of speed of delivery that it can bring. Seeing this on retailer and brand sites is only going to attract them to buy from those retailers that offer it.
Seems like a win-win-win for Amazon, brands/retailers and customers.
So, what is the downside? Well, some in the industry see this has a step towards not only dominating the non-marketplace, growing retailer space, but also setting Amazon up to dominate the ecommerce site creation space too.
Back in February 2021 Amazon purchased Shopify competitor Selz. With 2.5 million customers, Selz gives Amazon the ability to get back into allowing small businesses and entrepreneurs to create their own ecommerce sites. Amazon used to offer this through Amazon Webstore, but it closed that down in 2015. Over the pandemic, the marketplace had to stand back and watch thousands of ecommerce sites spring up, largely on Shopify.
Now it wants a piece of that pie – and if it adds this Buy with Prime to its Selz offering, it would have a solution for ecommerce brands to build stores and fulfil inventory via Prime Shipping, giving Amazon a clear dominant edge over all other competitors in the market.
