Buy with Prime, the feature that lets customers check out on your DTC sites using their Amazon Prime account, keeps getting bigger.
Last week, Amazon announced buzzy new partnerships with PayPal and TikTok for Buy with Prime—and it also launched a new kind of DSP ad, Amazon DSP for Buy with Prime.
It is a noteworthy step forward. First, a quick review: The logic behind Buy with Prime is that it cuts down on friction on your DTC site. Most shoppers already have Prime, so checking out is easier.
This is not always the most compelling use case when it comes to shoppers who stumbled on your DTC site organically. You aren’t really reaching net new shoppers. But now, Amazon is making it easier to use Amazon’s own data to drive shoppers back to your DTC site.
This means you can reach people who interacted with your product on Amazon and, if you have Buy with Prime enabled, lure them to your DTC site.
You’re using Amazon data—but at the end of the day, you keep the customer relationship.
What are the practical benefits of DSP for Buy with Prime?
To understand why a DSP for Buy with Prime ad might be useful, it’s helpful to remember, as we discussed here, that Buy with Prime lets you keep a lot of your shopper data.
Sure, shoppers might be checking out through their Prime accounts, but they are doing it on your Shopify site.
When shoppers use Buy with Prime, you can see:
- Customer name and email
- Date of the order
- Total number and value for their Buy with Prime orders
- Total number and value of their returns through Buy with Prime
- Items returned and return amount
The fact that you retain the customer relationship is meaningful when you consider that you can now reach Amazon shoppers with ads that refer back to your Shopify.
Think about those shoppers who have already been exposed to your brand in some way on Amazon. Maybe they bought a product from you on Amazon, and you have an upsell you want to pitch them.
Or maybe they added your product to cart but didn’t purchase yet, so you want to send them an ad that pushes them to convert.
You can of course run the typical re-targeting or upsell ads on Amazon that we always talk about. But this could also be a moment where you take a little bit of extra control, and run a DSP ad that funnels the shopper back to your website.
Then, if they complete the purchase on your Shopify page, you’ll have a more direct relationship with that customer.
You’ll have their email address, for instance, and you can send them deals and other messages anytime you want.
Big picture: DSP for Buy with Prime ads may become a way to use Amazon’s powerful ad targeting, while still keeping your customer relationship.
How does the targeting work? You can use Amazon’s data, or you can mix and match Amazon’s signals with the business’s own first-party signals.
So you can create highly granular audiences of people based on your knowledge and Amazon’s knowledge, pooled together.
We don’t know exactly what it will look yet, but it sounds a lot like the first-party data uploads you can currently do in Amazon Marketing Cloud. (Intentwise makes this easy.)
Links between Amazon and DTC are becoming stronger
At the end of the day, this is just one more attempt to tie together Amazon with the DTC experience.
Before this moment, it has been possible to link DSP ads back to your DTC website, through Amazon’s “Link Out” option, but this was never widely used.
Also, since 2022, brands have been able to buy Sponsored Brands ads on Amazon.com that link back to the Buy With Prime page on their DTC site. So basically, you could drive Amazon browsers back to your DTC store.
It was an exciting idea, but it took a lot of clicks to get there, watering down the potential benefit.
These new DSP ads, however, might make those connections between Amazon and DTC deeper.
With DSP ads for Buy with Prime, you can take Amazon shoppers and drive them back to your DTC site, where you own the customer relationship.
At the same time, you can also exclude your DTC shoppers from your Amazon DSP. Basically, you have more control than ever on how your Amazon and DTC shoppers overlap.
