Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Thursday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. And I'm the Co-founder and Managing Director here BWG Connect And we're a giant networking group of thousands of brands who do exactly that, networking, knowledge sharing together to stay on top of newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be that shaping digital as a whole. I spend the majority of my time just doing strategy sessions with brands, just to keep on top of those things. And when the same topics come up over and over again, we host a webinar like this or a dinner, we're gonna do close to a hundred dinners this year. If you are in a tier one city, let us know. We'd love to invite you to one of those all networking, knowledge sharing, no sales pitches, no presentations, just a great dinner with great conversation. Also, I'd love to have a conversation with anybody that's on the line today, just shoot me an email or I'll shoot you on afterwards. We'd love to set aside 30 minutes just to kind of roll through what we're seeing, but also pick your brain as well. And so as we get to this, we're starting three, four minutes after the hour, just so everybody knows, we're gonna wrap up with three to four minutes to go on the hour as well give everybody a chance to get into the next meeting without being late. The other thing was we always want these to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time you have questions, drop into the chat, drop them in the q&a, email them to me, aaron@bwgconnect.com. We're going to try and tackle as many of those real time as possible. And so with that, you know, this topic of Buy with Prime. We actually it's really interesting. We did one of our first events by Prime. Almost a year ago, outside of unbox, there's a lot of new developments that were taking place, a minute kind of almost took a back burner for brands. And now all of a sudden, I think with this Shopify announcement, some really cool things going on. And then brands have been popping up left and right. So they've had great experiences. And so then we end up like, Hey, how can we get a bunch of people together have a conversation on this. So again, you have questions, drop them into the chat. But we can go around the home on here really quick. Jordan, I'll kick it over to you. Then we can kick it to Jerrell, and then we can kick to Michael. You want to do brief intros on yourself. And then we'll jump into kind of the conversation. Sound good?

Jordan Brannon  2:26  

Awesome. My name is Jordan Brannon, President and Co founder at Coalition. We're a full service digital marketing agency, working with a lot of the leading eCommerce platforms and we work with brands in a wide range of categories and have also been a part of the Buy with Prime Agency Partner Program for the full run of it. So I've been really excited to share a little bit what we've learned in the past year and a half and change and also kind of what we're looking forward to with this coming holiday season with Buy with Prime.

Jerrel Culaba  2:53  

Great. Hi, everyone. My name is Jerrel Culaba. I'm on the business development team with Amazon Buy with Prime. Been with Amazon for three years and have launched a lot of different transportation technology products in that timespan. I spend most of my time working directly with merchants and vendors and help them get up and running on the Buy with Prime program and implement it into their digital strategy. So really excited to talk about some updates and just chat with the other panelists today.

Michael Challinger  3:24  

All right, and Aaron, you kind of did your intro already. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm Michael Challinger. I'm the CEO at a company called Houzer we sell sinks. I come from kind of the eCommerce side through and through so new as a CEO, not new to selling things. I used to work at a company called Build.com. From early on, we grew to be one of the largest online retailers on home products. I've been at this at Houzer for about a year, the very first thing I did when I came into the business was start the DTC process. So we had no DTC site to speak of. We did a lengthy RFP, which was BigCommerce platform, BigCommerce recommended Coalition to us. And we've been kind of like hip to hip with them ever since. Both on sort of the SI and implementation side, from a BigCommerce standpoint, all the way through to implementing Amazon Buy with Prime as well as some full service marketing, standing up channels. We've never had a practice for any kind of direct consumer marketing, customer acquisition, funnel marketing, etc. They've been fantastic, Buy with Prime team has also been fantastic, super white glove. Very, very straightforward and knowledgeable and also quite flexible and open to feedback, suggestions, recommendations for how do we best tell the story or describe the value of this, which is a substantial value that I think most brands still don't necessarily realize.

Aaron Conant  4:54  

Yeah, and I want to jump into that just a little bit and drill maybe I'll kind of start it with you which Is, which I mean, kind of where we got to this right demystifying the bylaws Prime program. But like Jerrel, like, if you want to give us some backstory. I mean, you said even there, you know, for three years, you've you've launched a bunch of these different platforms. But, you know, can you share with us motivation behind Buy with Prime who their general focus was originally for this? Who this would benefit? We'd love to hear some of those details. And then we can kind of just, you know, spin from there.

Jerrel Culaba  5:28  

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this question actually comes up a lot, Aaron, you know, this idea of, like, why is Amazon doing this, and it really comes back to customer obsession, which is one of Amazon's like, key leadership principles. So the idea is like, hey, you know, we have millions of Prime members, they go to amazon.com, they continually buy products there. And they've really grown to know and love, like the customer shopping experience on the website. But then if you also extend beyond just shopping, there's a lot of benefits that you get as a prime member, right, you get Prime video, you can print photos, like the list goes on, and on and on. So like an effort to continually drive more value for Prime members, this big idea came about like, hey, what if you could take your prime shopping benefits to your favorite websites, even off Amazon. And that's really what buyers prime started as this think big idea of extending free shipping, a seamless checkout, easy returns that very familiar shopping experience, to websites that are off Amazon. So that's what we did. And it really started with like FBA sellers about 18 months ago, if you think about like, who would kind of approach this idea and pitcher two, first, it made sense to speak with FBA sellers, because they were already familiar with the Amazon fulfillment network, that their products stored in our fulfillment centers. So that's really where we went. And what we learned was like, the proof of concept was there, right? These, these merchants were telling us that they're seeing great conversion, they really liked the added customer experience. And that's what kicked it all off. And so since then, we've really expanded our kind of customer segmentation. We've gotten up market, you know, we have larger brands, larger merchants that we're working with. And even now, our 1P vendors are enabling by with Prime, right. So these are traditionally brands who had sell products through Amazon, kind of like a wholesale model. They're now implementing it into their direct to consumer strategy. So that's a little bit of the background. And you know, how it all started.

Aaron Conant  7:43  

Now, it's interesting on the 1P side, for sure, because I know, you know, when I originally rolled out, it was on the third party, and I had a lot of vendors, you know, on the 1P, I'd say, and brands, I should say, on the 1P side the vendor side of Amazon saying, Hey, I don't know if we can make this work. It doesn't make sense how we're going to buy resale, how are we gonna sell them resell back to us. But it sounds like you've got to figure it out. But anyways, I want to, like keep going down this path just from the standpoint of and just remind our people, if you have questions, drop them the chat or the q&a. You know, Jordan, Michael, you guys are really familiar with this space as a whole, you're in touch across the board with what's happening. Like, what were you how have you seen this evolve? What were your first thoughts as this rolled out, and then has that evolved at all, I would love to hear your thoughts there.

Jordan Brannon  8:32  

For me, I know, I'll jump in first maybe but to go to Michael and Jerrel after that. But Amazon to me that the appeal has always been the audience. And for a long time there was this real sense of Amazon owns that audience. And you are are competing for attention inside of Amazon's ecosystem for that audience. And, you know, obviously Amazon has done a lot to cultivate and grow their market share as an eCommerce platform. And then also make sure they're really building great loyalty with Amazon shoppers, I bought a new battery for a camera this morning on Amazon and two seconds just before I was jumping into this meeting and realize that hadn't found one forgotten to order it. And just that whole process of being able to trust the place that you're purchasing Trust, the delivery promise, no, your credit card information is in good hands know that you've got great reviews and other things to look at. So Amazon really just had, you know, has that sort of inside edge on the audience. So when I heard about Buy with Prime from a marketer perspective, got really excited. It really seemed like Amazon was was creating this space where Amazon would allow you to interact with their audience and with all the great things that Amazon has cultivated, you know, from a brand perspective with the audience. So we got really, really excited about that we're always interested in how do we grow our client businesses, how do we increase their opportunity through marketing and through through grade eight eCommerce channels. And so it was just for us was like an instant like, we have to be involved in this. And we started reaching out right away to our Amazon points of contact, find out how we could be participants by with Prime agency program.

Michael Challinger  10:11  

So my journey goes a little further back, I think with Buy with Prime, when I was at build, we were one of the first early adopters of a product that was variously called lots of things. But along the way, it was called Login with Amazon. So this was Amazon, basically, as Jerrel described, this is probably 10 years ago plus, at this point, saying, Okay, if you're a retailer, we want to enable your customers to log in with their Amazon account information. There was no promise of Prime shipping or anything like that, it was simply just a way that you could expedite or theoretically expedite your customer conversion, simplify the process, especially on mobile with a single source login, obviously, something that many other people have implemented, you can log in with Google, you can log in with Apple, you can log in with PayPal, and you know, 1000, different things. But Amazon was one of those early adopters with that. And that was contentious. I mean, especially as a retailer for us to implement, kind of, you know, doing a deal with the devil and in some sense, but it was a successful product for us. And we saw conversion rate lift, even way back then. So I first came across buy with prime at a new sale connect conference, probably a year and a half ago at this point. And it was going around the retailer and supplier community as something that was too good to be true. And it was sort of almost this mythical unicorn where people were having hushed side conversations over cocktails, you know, after our conference, Hey, I heard that by with prime allows you to acts like I heard that they allow you to get all of your Amazon reviews imported into your DTC site. No, there's no way that they would do that, that that's just too good to be true. I heard that they're, you know, paying for offset traffic to help you test and improve the concept. No, there's no way they would do that. So the initial things that I heard, were all basically, there's no way that Amazon would ever consider doing as exposing their customer data to you, as a theoretically competitive retailer, although no one really competes with them. Some think they do, but no one truly does. Still, it's, you know, a sacrosanct thing. So that was the initial introduction. And then through the BigCommerce team, actually, I got to know the Buy with Prime team, and found, of course, that it was all in fact true and that there was even more to it. Right. And I will be honest, my first impression, as maybe Jerrel will recall, was proud these guys don't have any idea how to really tell the story of how valuable this product could be, to a retailer, a brand, a brand, especially a big established brand, with a big established Amazon business that doesn't have DTC and is trying to start their journey. It's an absurd scale accelerator. So of course, we early adopted, of course, we were one of the first folks to launch with it. Then close with withdrawals, I was first seen along the way, I have spoken at conferences about it about our experience, have just shamelessly shelled it here and there to everybody that I meet as probably the single biggest scale factor that you can implement. If you're trying to start your DTC journey for reasons I can elaborate on later. It's this amazing product. So very excited to see where it goes, and how it continues to develop for both the community at large as well as for our own business.

Aaron Conant  13:42  

And I'd love to hear from Jerrel, too. And then we got a couple questions that come in. And my guess is when we open up the questions, we start getting them answer, they're going to just really flow in, but like your thoughts, you're in Amazon, you you've been there you're seeing them launch these programs, what were like, when you heard about Buy with Prime, what was the initial thoughts that went through your mind? And then we can jump to these questions, and then we can keep rolling through more as they come in.

Jerrel Culaba  14:11  

Yeah, that sounds good. It is interesting to hear Jordan and Michael's perspective, like, first of all, like, I noticed that everyone went back to like 10 years ago, or, you know, X amount of years ago and kind of seen Buy with Prime coming. And I totally agree. So my background in supply chain logistics, and I worked at FedEx for 10 years before joining Amazon. And I worked with a lot of different brands from enterprise Fortune 500 companies to like small mom and pops in that time span. But what I noticed about 10 years ago is a lot of these companies who owned their own fulfillment strategies, like they truly did everything in house. They were aiming to like compete with Amazon, so they'd often look for ways to duplicate this like Prime fast delivery network that Amazon had built. And they were realizing like how challenging that is both from a cost perspective, operational perspective. You know, there's a lot of reasons as far as why that's hard. So I actually back then called it the Amazon effect as these companies were trying to figure that out. So fast forward, I ended up at Amazon. And I helped launch what we call the enterprise multi channel fulfillment team. So multi channel fulfillment is Amazon's capability of like, offering white glove and white label fulfillment services. So truly, Amazon's network as a 3PL. So you know, the idea is, hey, maybe you want like Amazon logistics, you want the speed and benefit of the logistics capabilities, but you don't want to sell your products on Amazon. That's what Amazon multi channel fulfillment was all about. So you can see where I'm going, as you know, the trend was going from Okay, Amazon has this network, how do we compete to oh, look, Amazon's actually offering white label fulfillment services. And now here we are with Buy with Prime, where it's, it's the it's the branded Prime experience. Right. So not just the fulfillment, speed, but also marketing levers, and many of the things that Michael talked about. So, you know, I thought it made sense from the beginning. And it's a very cool story to watch it kind of transcend from, you know, 10 years ago to here, we are now doing something that people thought we would never do.

Aaron Conant  16:20  

Yeah. So let's tackle just a couple of these questions that have popped up. Because you were, you know, we're talking about multi channel fulfillment. So if I go down that thread first, Stephen writes in, is there support for a combined cart? Where some items are fulfilled through prime and others are fulfilled through merchant distribution centers?

Jerrel Culaba  16:41  

Yeah, that's a good question. And it comes up often. So today, the experiences of fourth cart experience, right. So Buy with Prime eligible products can live in the buyer's Prime card. But as a shopper, if you want to add a non Prime eligible product, that would have to go through the native checkout, what I can say is that's changing and it's changing rapidly. We'll talk a little bit more later about the Shopify app. But there are some like technical and operational challenges since Amazon is handling the fulfillment of all the products. So if you think about it, break that down, right. So Amazon has the fulfillment if we have three items in stock in our FCS, but not the fourth item in stock, like how do we combine that cart? So we're working through those things, and we actually have a roadmap plan. And that will address that soon. But the first iteration of CART does include a fourth experience.

Aaron Conant  17:40  

So allowing them for checkout to use the Amazon account for payment, does the customer get redirected to Amazon for checkout? Or does the user remain on the merchants website?

Jerrel Culaba  17:53  

Yeah we're calling it a hosted checkout experience, because there is like a pop up experience that happens that allows the user to authenticate their Amazon account. But once they're done checking out, it redirects them directly back to the site, right? So we don't send them to amazon.com. Or just leave them hanging, it directs them back to the PDP that they were checking out from.

Aaron Conant  18:19  

Awesome. And then a couple more, that pop in. I just want to clarify, Amazon will share all of their reviews with you so you can put them on your DTC site? Is that what was said? So if you have review sharing software that shares to other retailers from your DTC site, will that take all the Amazon reviews with them?

Jerrel Culaba  18:43  

Yeah, so I think Michael said this pretty well, as far as like, this is one thing we don't shout out enough is Amazon reviews. So yes, the product is called Reviews from Amazon. And what it does is it allows users or Buy with Prime brands to leverage Amazon review data. So all of the review data that sits on an asin at amazon.com. And you can pull that in at the product level and make it available for your products that are on Buy with Prime within your DTC site. And then the second part of the question like can it live next to like, whatever existing review technology provider you have? The answer is yes. And we have many merchants who maybe surface like the negative reviews, and then Amazon reviews, or choose to just use Amazon reviews, it's flexible and can be configured in a number of different ways.

Aaron Conant  19:38  

You guys have solved a lot of issues over the last like year. It's it's pretty, pretty sweet. So one more question that I want to kind of get to where this is evolving to because of that issue. Like there, you know, like, how has it changed over the last year, year and a half, but less last one, do brands get access to the consumer data for consumers that utilize Buy with Prime and are we able to add Add them that data to our CDP. So they're the branded customers, right? So it seemed like yes, but.

Jerrel Culaba  20:06  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the big changes as it relates to how Amazon reviews, like customer data. So if you think about it, if you're selling to Amazon as like a 1P vendor, or even an FBA seller, you get some type of encrypted view of who's buying your products. But with Buy with Prime we've we've broken that mold. So when a shopper checks out with both prime, you actually have full access to their their data. So you get their name, their email address, cell phone number, and the last four digits of payment method that they use to check out and buy the products from your site. And the idea here really is about like driving long term relationships, right. So we want you to be successful on your b2c side, we want to add value to the Prime shopper by giving them more selection off Amazon while using their benefits. And so by passing the review data, you know, brands can add that into their long term like marketing strategies, retouch these people encourage them to come back to the site, and really drive a direct relationship with what we believe is a high value shopper, right? Like all shoppers aren't created equal. But we believe that Prime shoppers are high quality.

Jordan Brannon  21:25  

I would just jump in from the agency side of things, I think that's one of the really crucial things is to look at a Buy with Prime, a follow up retargeting type funnel because again, these are very engaged customers. Some of our brands are using Amazon Prime promotions to help drive the interest to their DTC site through buy with prime. And then really seeing a great lifetime value emerge from those by with Prime consumers really a key piece of of the strategy here.

Michael Challinger  21:57  

And I don't know if you guys saw but someone was also asking a question in the chat about syndicating those reviews. They're not syndicatable, unfortunately, because they're coming over dynamically through the integration. But I think it's a great question. And it does sort of inform, and I've shared this with others. If you're using a tool like Bazaarvoice, or something similar, you're paying five to six figures a year for a product that exclusively is focused on user generated content. So you know, even the simplest organization can extrapolate from that the value that that UGC has, and that's UGC across lesser retailers comparative to than Amazon. Most brands have more reviews on Amazon than any other retailer, typically more reviews on Amazon than all of their other retailers added together. So the value of that content is absurdly high. If Amazon were to save that content to a company like Bazaarvoice, and offer to them, as our voice will probably pay them hundreds of millions of dollars for access to that data. That's pretty crazy to get access to it for free. Or really for more than free in the context of this. Yeah. There's no way when you've ingested that, that Amazon review data for its end to get syndicated through something like Bazaarvoice out to your other retailers.

Jerrel Culaba  23:18  

Yeah, you're cracking that Michael, you're spot on.

Jordan Brannon  23:21  

I would call out one. One merchant use case we have is they're doing Buy with Prime, but also creating product listing specific content using Amazon UGC, through our favorite conversational AIs. So it's a unique product description that specifically is tailored towards that buy with prime audience, which is again, print pretty impactful for them.

Aaron Conant  23:45  

No, awesome, are there like key things that stand out to you Jerrel around this evolution over the past year and a half, because, you know, I mean, I'm just talking to brands all day, every day. And again, a year, year and a half ago, this was something that people were kind of talking about, if people like Michael, who are you know, at the forefront of everything, and willing to trial and error and understand what's going to work and what's gonna not but what's not gonna work, but there's a lot of people were just kind of scratching their heads, then all of a sudden you're fast forwarding and but it's coming up all the time now. And even before the Shopify announcement, where they're like, What are the key things over the past year and a half that you guys have addressed that you think are main things that have changed?

Jerrel Culaba  24:29  

Things have evolved so quickly. It's hard to keep up with and I know that's true for our industry, as far as eCommerce is concerned, but especially for Buy with Prime. So like many people have already heard about the big data point, which is when you add Buy with Prime to product detail page, on average, it will increase the purchase conversion rate by 25%. Compared to that same product that does not have Buy with Prime on that product detail page. So that's a really compelling point, right if you're seeing 1% conversion You add the by train button, you should see 1.25%. So we're really excited about that. And, you know, that was that was a long time coming to come and announce that data point we had, we had to get a high degree of confidence and a high amount of data to really go out and be public with that. And we're working on other data points that will come in the coming months. So more to come there. But I think another thing that's evolved is, you know, Buy with Prime is more than just a button and shopper experience tool, I think that it also is a marketing lever, that can be really valuable. Like, for example, like one thing that we've done is we have a calendar of events that we run every month or every other month. And the idea is we want to raise shopper awareness, to make sure that all of the Prime audience that we have access to is aware of the direct to consumer websites that are hosting buyers prime to do what I said was important, right, like increased selection, drive them to the websites of our buyers, prime brands. And so back in July, we had Prime Day, everyone knows about Prime Day that broke a lot of records and surprised Wall Street in terms of how it performed. But one of the things about Prime days, for the first time ever, we had key real estate and banners on amazon.com that sent a message to shoppers saying like, hey, look, welcome to Prime Day on Amazon. But did you know, you can go visit these brands who are also offering prime deals and checkout using your Prime membership there. So we saw a tremendous amount of success there, we had a lot of great feedback. And from a data perspective, the brands that participated in that campaign actually saw a 10x increase in their buyers prime orders during that period, and an 8x increase in revenue from those orders. So when I say marketing lever, like we're actually investing from a marketing perspective across all of our funnels, to make sure that this is this is a successful program. And we're doubling down on this. So right now we're actually focused on our Q4 marketing timelines where next month, we'll be running a new promotion called prime big deals day. And then obviously, Turkey 5 is going to be another one where we're trying to duplicate the success that we saw during Prime Day.

Aaron Conant  27:23  

Awesome. Jordan, my God, oh, God, if you have comments in that, and then we can tackle some of these questions that popped up in the q&a as well.

Jordan Brannon  27:32  

Yeah, I think I mean, it's it isn't sort of the the real magic of it, you know, once you have access to a highly loyal, highly transactional audience with a lot of confidence in that purchasing experience, and who shopped very regularly, all of us in eCommerce sort of get it when we just like, if I, if I were to come to you, and I was just offering snake oil. And I led with that most of us would be interested. But you know, when it's backed by Amazon and Amazon's audience, and Amazon's tech and solutions, it really is a thing that every merchant, even if you're not currently doing anything with Amazon at all, needs to start evaluating, you know, is this a growth strategy for us? I think the answer is yes. Um, maybe I'll tackle Craig's questions specifically, since it is related to what Jerrel just said, you know, you can be advertising your Buy with Prime experiences inside of Amazon to Amazon customers to get them to your DTC store, there's a range of different ads that you can use to do that. Amazon, again, from a partnership perspective with you, as a merchant, is doing some really cool things, which again, if you have a little bit of a bias against Amazon, you may not think are normal, where they're taking valuable real estate on key selling days, and then pushing this Buy with Prime program, and merchants and products in that program, to their audience. And again, I think drill that stat, you know, 10x type of, you know, metric boosts coming out of out of the last Prime Day. We have another one coming up. And some of our merchants, we're seeing some really, really exciting outcomes just because of that that net new audience that they're landing a way to meaningfully participate in Prime Day. So yeah, it was just overall very, very exciting sort of opportunity to market and co-promote with Amazon through Buy with Prime.

Jerrel Culaba  29:24  

Yeah, Jordan. And Aaron, I don't want to miss the the Shopify point. You know,.

Aaron Conant  29:31  

I think it's a game changer. That's what I think, it is a game changer.

Jerrel Culaba  29:35  

Yeah, I think so too. And the leak actually ended up being a good thing. Right? It was leaked in the press that Shopify and Buy with Prime were partnering up, but the reason I think that's a good thing is we were already planning to announce it soon, you know, and accelerate here in a couple of weeks. So just jumpstart the announcement, but I can tease out some of the reasons why I think it's going to be really important. Um, many people might have heard about like this idea of like terms and conditions. So when we first launched Buy with Prime, one of the things that would happen occasionally is when like a developer would add our code to a certain theme, a message would appear that says, like, hey, like, you can do this, but it might be violating the terms and conditions of your Shopify agreement. So that was a huge headwind for us. And it was not a good thing, because obviously, it would cause a lot of risk. So that's gone, right, because now we've built an app that is in partnership with Shopify, it's downloadable through the marketplace. So you know, that addresses that point right there. But really, what's what's going to be nice about it is the development time is going to be drastically reduced. So now, instead of spending, you know, multiple hours with developers and making sure that you know, the codes installed, it looks the right way on the page, like, it's all going to be very quick and easy with a few clicks. And by way of downloading the app, and it's gonna sit natively within the current theme. So that's great. Also, today, like we have a separate UI called merchant console, where you have to manage your Buy with Prime settings, when the app launches, all of that will be done within Shopify. So you can kind of manage all of your settings, and view all of your orders in one streamline place. So we're excited about that. And there's a lot of other things coming, but just wanted to address the elephant in the room and say that, you know, we're super excited about the app. And I think it's gonna be a huge game changer like you said.

Aaron Conant  31:39  

You just on that I want to go with it. Michael, really quick, like how big is a merchant? How important is these changes been? And like, the across the business, like, is this a must have? I mean, is that how people should be looking at it? Because we'd love to hear your thoughts there. And then there's a bunch of questions we got to get through because there's some good ones in May, we'll answer them as we go. But I want to make sure we get to those. But where do you put it right now, Michael, I think that's where some people are wondering.

Michael Challinger  32:13  

So on stage, what I've said is, if you are a brand that is sold omni channel, so you have a DTC site, or you're trying to start one originally, and you have an Amazon business, this is an absolute must have, especially to early adopt, for the reasons that have been articulated, and a couple others, right, we've now beaten the horse dead as far as the value of your UGC, the value of co-marketing  again, during Prime Day, on gateway and woodlands homepage, you could be directly linked as a buyer with Prime partner. Not that everyone should expect access to that. Jerrel, I don't want to create expectations for those in the call. But that's the level of insane support that Amazon has put in behind this lesson to actively it took me a few months of being involved with Buy with Prime and sort of thinking here and there about it. The less obvious thing, if you're a 1P merchant is, if you're FBA, you control your own inventory. So you are in charge of what you inbound, you maintain your inventories. So essentially, you should never run out of stock unless you screw up. If you are a 1P merchant, it's a different story. Most 1P merchants have endless horror stories. Those of you that we're doing this business during COVID might remember when Amazon just stopped sending purchase orders altogether. And tons of merchants went completely out of stock. When you go out of stock as a merchant, the Amazon flywheel for the asin, that stocks out goes backwards. And so if you have the number one best selling, or best selling ranking product within a given key search terms, say you're selling toothbrushes, and you have the top one, two or three ranked products in the search toothbrush, that is worth 10s of millions of dollars a week. And so if you lose that spot because you're out of stock and the flywheel accelerates, you've lost probably hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue for the future. Because even once you come back into stock, you're no longer in that top one two or three spot and you've got to claw your way back up typically spending in Amazon advertising. And it stops us from so one of the less obvious benefits of adopting by with Brian is it allows you to leverage your DTC site as sort of a auxilary buffer of safety stock for your, your Amazon ASINs because now you've got a product that's sitting in Amazon MCF virtually, you know, just a few feet away from the one side of the warehouse. And so if you had have an Amazon chosen SOC level of that asin that toothbrush of, say 1000 units. So Amazon's buying to a stock level of 1000 units, because that's what their beauty five algorithm has determined is the right level. And then Amazon has a huge spike in orders and they run out, you got to wait for Amazon to reorder. If you also have another 1000 sitting in MCF, filling your business. And you realize that you're in jeopardy of stocking out, you can essentially transfer that inventory over. You know, and there's a couple of directions Amazon's going with this. And I don't know if they'll does or doesn't speak to some of those. But that's sort of the I think the long term ambition is you're creating this this auxiliary stock pool. And that's incredibly powerful. And it's a thing that most merchants don't understand. They don't realize the sheer dollar revenue cost of lost asin flywheel velocity, and last search ranking. As a result, they think about, Oh, we lost this much in POS. But they're not realizing the much bigger impact isn't the loss and POS, it's the loss in actual customer ordering. Because of your search ranking. Your SERP decreases as you try to stock in your flywheel spins down. And that costs brands 10s, or hundreds of millions of dollars. And so this gives you a tool to to forestall that. In an environment where often as a one Key Merchant, you're not, you're somewhat restricted or forbidden from having an FBA listing. So you can't build that safety stock yourself and a lot of cases because Amazon resale will prevent it. However, if you're in a situation, this is a way around that to create that safety sock will also support a year typically very profitable, because he doesn't. Yeah.

Aaron Conant  36:45  

Let's, yeah, we got a lot of questions. And I think some of them overlap with other questions we've gathered from brands over the past couple of weeks that we wanted to be sure to ask you, and one of those is going around how does payment processing work? You know, through our gateway or Amazon. So I guess that's kind of that goes along with other ones that that have come in around, you know how does Buy with Prime charge merchants as a whole. So maybe we tackle the payment processing? And how does Buy with Prime charge merchants if we can wrap that into one and then utilizing multi channel fulfillment is another one, Craig, we'll get to yours, and then tailor the key to this is going to be fun.

Jerrel Culaba  37:32  

Yeah, sounds good. And I think we'll answer Craig's question when I talked about the pricing model and how we charge so I think the first thing to highlight is both prime is built on a pay as you go model. So there's no contracts or minimum volume equipment requirements, it's truly based off like you use it. And you'll get charged at the order level, every time a customer checks out with the bath prime button. And so the easy way to think about is to break it down into these three buckets that are on screen here, you add these three together, and that would be the cost for fulfilling a bheith prime order. Right. So the first one is getting going to be a prime service fee, you can think about this similar to like a marketing fee or a referral fee, basically a 3% charge for using the prime brand. For those that are selling on FBA, they might be familiar with the referral fee, and it's 15% on the Amazon marketplace. So this is 3%. And you can think about it in a similar way. The second bucket will be a fulfillment fee. So to get back to Craig's question about is multi channel fulfillment required, it is because we are doing the fulfillment of the products. That's how we're able to offer the fast free delivery. So we have a fulfillment fee that's really based off the size and weight of the item. And that fulfillment fee starts at 538. But what it includes is all of the things that you think about when it comes to order fulfillment, right, so the picking the packing the labor, the inner dunnage, the outer packaging, as well as the residential delivery, all of that in the single line item, you know, there's no additional surcharges, fuel surcharge area search area delivery areas surcharge, all the things you'd see on a typical carrier invoice. It's just one flat fee, so we try to simplify it there. And then finally, there's a payment processing fee. So we use Amazon pay as the payment processor. That's how we're pulling in the shoppers payment credentials from their Amazon account. So there's a 2.4% charge plus 30 cents per transaction. On that note, something's changing. So you know, we talked about the Shopify app. And one of the things that will change when the Shopify app comes out will be Amazon pay will not be processing the payment. So that'll go through the Shopify payment process. So that 2.4% charge from us will drop off. And as a merchant, you know, Shopify will actually process and authenticate the payment. So we still use Amazon pay just to kind of verify that the shopper is indeed a Prime member. But that's one of the things that will change and make this cost model two tiered instead of three tiered when the Shopify app does come out.

Aaron Conant  40:31  

Awesome. So that captures multi channel fulfillment. Can retailers with Buy with Prime enabled use Buy with Prime copy and assets in their advertising channels? And I think the answer was yes, but I'll kick it over to you.

Jerrel Culaba  40:47  

Yeah, that's a great question, too. So you're right, Aaron, they absolutely can. And to take it one step further, we actually provide a marketing guidelines book. And in that book is a series of different marketing collateral, you know, best practices, images, image files, ways that they can implement prime branding into, you know, all the funnels across their their different marketing strategies. So whether that's social, SEO, you name it, we actually encourage brands to use  Buy with Prime marketing to help raise shopper awareness.

Jordan Brannon  41:21  

Yeah, I'll jump into I think that's, again, the biggest, we're coming at it from that marketing perspective. And so that is really, really crucial for us is that Amazon trust, especially if you're emerging brand, maybe a name that people are not familiar with, and you're trying to borrow someone else's authority, Buy with Prime is a really great way to do that you're kind of leaning on the recognition that Amazon's achieved in the market already. And so if you're driving someone to a DTC site, nobody's ever been to the.com. They have some natural built in skepticism around some of that, especially for high ticket items. You know, some some of the products that Houzer sells are above our typical ARV for a DTC product, that extra trust can be really, really valuable for them.

Aaron Conant  42:09  

So another question that has come in before, you know beforehand, just from brands we kind of pulled was in it goes along with one that Stephens written in here, like how mature is the BigCommerce integration, especially compared to Shopify key differences? That goes along with what is the technical lift required to get going with Buy with Prime that has popped up a lot?

Jordan Brannon  42:31  

I can probably speak to maybe some of the comparison today. So part of what happens with the Shopify app is it helps give Shopify parity to some of the other eCommerce platforms that have been more aggressive in seeing the value and then coordinating with Amazon on that front. Certainly, I think the biggest thing that comes out of Shopify is Shopify is total ecosystem size is quite substantial. And then also shop pay is sort of the kind of the new thing that's coming out with the shop app, specifically the Shopify Amazon buy with prime app, specifically, that's a bit more novel from some of your other eCommerce platforms. It is essentially having a different payment solution. That's, that's implemented there. But right now, if, for us from an implementation standpoint, onboarding, almost everybody's easier to do than Shopify. still doable with Shopify, but it just a little bit easier to take advantage of Buy with Prime today for other platforms. But the app basically closes that gap, and then again, introduces something new with the shop pay solution.

Aaron Conant  43:37  

Awesome Jerrel, I'd love to hear thoughts there, too. And then I also want to kick it over to Michael, around like, are there like key things that people should be aware of? And then we've got a couple more questions that have popped in around direct fulfillment.

Jerrel Culaba  43:51  

Yeah, no, I think Jordan summed it up pretty well, as far as the differences are concerned. And just to also highlight for like the BigCommerce fans in the room, like we have a BigCommerce app as well. Right. And I think Jordan touched on it in a good way, like eat look at the Shopify ecosystem, obviously, they have like the lion's share, as far as like, how many websites are on their platform, but BigCommerce is a great partner as well. And so we built an app to make it easier for, for those BigCommerce users to implement Buy with Prime like to answer the question directly, which How is it in maturity? Like we released the BigCommerce app first, obviously, maybe because like the the business relationship was more affording to get that app developed quickly. But both are great partners, and we have to win in both those spaces to make sure that you know, it's it's buys time is readily available for like most merchants who choose to add it to their site. So I wouldn't say one is better than the other. I would say that it really depends on the use case and you know, which is the preferred platform for a brand.

Michael Challinger  45:02  

I would say when we started this process, I think Shopify was maybe a little further along drove, but now I would say there parody. And that's the cost or opportunity cost of early adopting, right? We were one of the first versions to ever really even talked about with Brian. And so I think you were a little further along on the Shopify development. But at this point, there's now pros and cons to either, but the the core features are pretty much in place for both both integrations. And so, again, we've we've never really had an issue with the BigCommerce integration. I will say that, you know, to the points that everyone else has made some very interesting pros and cons, as I mentioned to what's happening with Shopify, and I'm watching that closely. But I would say it doesn't, you can be fairly agnostic, whether you're BigCommerce, or Shopify, I can't opine on other platforms like Salesforce, Salesforce commerce, cloud, things like that. I don't know, if you have any kind of integration there built.

Jerrel Culaba  46:00  

There's more coming on that very soon. It's going to be actually yeah, I think I think you'll see like, a big bus on that similar to the Shopify stuff. But we'll see what happens in the next six months or so there.

Aaron Conant  46:13  

Yep. Michael, from a marketer's perspective. What types of groups? I mean, you've been there, like you said, your early adopters, so you've seen it, and you vet out the different service providers or options more than anybody, I mean, just the in depth that you go to like, what, what types of groups or merchants? Would you recommend  Buy with Prime to strongly and, you know, is there any, like, cautionary situations for you as you're, you're advising like brands in this space?

Michael Challinger  46:44  

No, I mean, I think it's a universal recommendation for everybody. But if you are a brand, who is just starting a DTC journey, you know, you've sold through traditional retail wholesale channels, it's especially juicy because of that added spin up that you'll get from and I think Jordan actually double down on this point in that, not only are you getting that review data, which is critical to hit a critical mass, so that your customers can trust you from the UGC standpoint, but you're also gaining some trust badging as well by sort of CO piloting the Amazon name on your own site, and we are selling, you know, very extensive thousand dollar things. So we offer a lifetime warranty and various other value props, but having it's still relatively an unknown brand, because the brand has always been sold to those channels that have never really invested in being a customer facing brand name. So that's, I think that's an excellent point. So I would say universal recommend recommendation. But incredibly game changing, if like we are you are a brand that is very new to the DTC journey. I would say, you know, someone in the chat asked about, what, what if this encourages your customer to go to Amazon. I mean, Amazon is encouraging their customers to go to you through gateway placements and other other features from a marketing standpoint, but that's certainly a risk. However, this is a customer who has already come to your site, right? Like they've bucked the default trend, which is the majority of people start their shopping now directly on Amazon, and they've come to your site. So there's a risk of that. But I think you can also mitigate that risk by the UX and overall experience of your DTC site. So for example, I've seen a lot of brands differentiate and build their DTC, you know, why buy from us as you get additional years of warranty, which doesn't work for us because we offer a lifetime warranty on all our things. But the they'll typically have, you know, a by direct difference, right, you get longer warranty, you get more direct access to customer support, you get loyalty points or whatever. And so if you're concerned about that, you can always double down on your moat in terms of your DTC experience. And, you know, speaking very briefly about DTC in general, since you know, Aaron, you were talking about AI, that was actually just one of the keynote speakers at detail east and Shelley who was was moderating our panel made amazing points about the value of AI, which ties into the value of BioPharm, giving you access to customer data, which is if you expect to use generative AI in any shape or form in the next year or two, it's even more important than ever before to have a data that contains as many of your customers information as possible, because that's going to be what those language learning we're also going to train on. So having a DTC site and having an DTC site using Buy with Prime that allows you access to customer data is actually pretty pivotal. So anyway, but short long answer to a short question I recommended to everyone but truthfully so if you are a new to DTC brand with traditional omni channel retail.

Aaron Conant  49:57  

Yeah, awesome, and thanks for tackling Sam's question in there too. About dragging customers away. Awesome. I totally agree, I think that's something that people aren't considering is like grabbing as much customer data as possible. So, really quick here Jerrel, are you able to share a rough number of how many brands you currently have enrolled in Buy with Prime? That's a question that comes in.

Jerrel Culaba  50:22  

Yeah, I can't share the the exact number. But I can tell you that it's in the four to five figure range, right? That's, that's all I can really release at this time. But you know, it's a substantial amount. And then the orders are definitely in like the seven figure range as far as how many units we've seen. So hopefully, that helps. As far as have an idea of like, what the customer and unit volume looks like, so far.

Aaron Conant  50:47  

Is there a minimum sales volume you have to do per month to have Buy with Prime? That's another question that pops in.

Jerrel Culaba  50:53  

Now? That's a good question. And the answer is no, you know, we have like garage sellers, all the way up to very reputable, recognizable brands.

Aaron Conant  51:04  

Awesome. And we have three minutes left, I always like to add, always make sure that we have time to wrap up here. But we don't go over so people get on to the next meeting without being late. We do have a bunch of questions that remain open, more than happy to connect people with Michael, Jerrel, Jordan, after the conversation today. For follow up conversations and make sure I'm sure everybody, you know, probably has four or five more questions as a whole. But more than happy to suit around connection so we can get all of those answers. But you know, if we can, you know, Michael, I'm going to start with you, you know, 30 seconds of like key takeaways. I mean, I think you just nailed it. But I don't know if there's something you're like, Hey, I got one more thing I'd love to share. Then I'll take it to you, Jerrel, and then I'll kick it to Jordan to wrap us up. But you know, Michael, is there anything that you're like, oh, wait, I'd love to share this one more tidbit?

Michael Challinger  51:56  

I would say I injected a lot of them that last week. But yeah, I think I would probably zoom out to the advice that I give everyone, which is if like there's there's a use case for this, even for brands that don't have, you know, a current DTC strategy, which is if you're on this webinar, and you're thinking about, how can we use this, we don't have a DTC. So I would encourage you to think about having a DTC site. So in that keynote, that I gave a detail, one of the questions that I got asked was, What are your, you know, biggest mistakes in DTC, and the top of my list was not doing DTC, we're at a point as an industry where it is basically, you're throwing money away as an established brand, not selling direct to consumer, if brands like Nike, who famously walked away from Amazon, to pursue their direct selling brands like Kohler, one of the best known brands and in the North American market, can sell direct to consumer at their map price on their own site. There's no excuse for any brand not to have some level of engagement, even if you want to be really tepid about it and, you know, set your price above your map and create, you know, a price value perspective for your retailers, doesn't matter, you're still gonna find people willing to pay that more premium price, you are just walking away from profit dollars if you don't do it. And if you do do it and you don't use by with prime, then you're just walking away from more profit dollars through the conversion value of having access to your, your Amazon reviews, your data, and everything else. So you know, this, this is probably for every brand in the sense that if you aren't doing DTC, you should be if you are doing new C you should have private brand.

Aaron Conant  53:45  

Awesome, love it. Jerrel, I'll kick it over to you, and then we'll wrap it up with Jordan.

Jerrel Culaba  53:49  

Yeah, sounds good. I mean, I would say that if you're on this call, just know that you would get support both from Coalition as well as BWG. And what that means is you also get support from Amazon in the Buy with Prime team. So this wouldn't be something that you just are on your own to go figure out, like, you'd be working with a lot of people in your background to make sure it's, it's helping and in getting the results you want. And then also, I would just say like, like we encourage testing, right? If you have hesitancies, and you're worried about risk, like that's what testings for. And we do conduct A/B tests during, you know, 30, 60 day periods where we actually like, test and see if we can get the results that we expect. So if you're hesitant, you don't want to go all in that's completely okay, let's test and iterate and and see if we can make Buy with Prime as valuable as it is for so many other brands for you to. But thank you. I appreciate it. It's really fun today.

Aaron Conant  54:45  

Yeah, it's a blast. Jordan, you want to wrap us up here?

Jordan Brannon  54:48  

Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think again, hitting on the points. The big opportunity to grow audience to leverage the Amazon trust in the market. Certainly I think you know, we've always been focused on providing technical solutions to marketing challenges, it's a big part of who we are. And so this is really sort of that magic sweet spot for us. We've got a couple of promotions, in conjunction with Amazon Buy with Prime that we're happy to offer. So we're going to be offering a free onboarding for two brands that follow up with us as a result of the webinar today. So that's, uh, if you're somebody you're already sort of ready to move forward with and you just haven't figured out how to get that done. We're certainly happy to help you with that. And for everybody else, if you're interested, we can help support a an audit about how to implement by with crime, other marketing channels and strategies as well. So there's a few different things that you can take advantage of, and our team will follow up with you after the call today.

Aaron Conant  55:42  

Awesome. Well, Michael, Jerrel, Jordan, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks, everybody, for dialing in. Thanks for all the great questions, fantastic. The hour went by incredibly quickly look for a follow up email from us as well. If you ever need help, just with a digital strategy session. That's what we do here. So I spend most of my time doing if you need any help with partner selection, don't ever hesitate to reach out tons of new things popping up across the landscape. With that we're going to wrap up this webinar as a whole. Thanks again, everybody for dialing in. Everybody take care, stay safe. Look forward to having you in a future event. Thanks, everybody.