The news: Amazon has launched Buy with Prime, which aims to improve its suite of checkout offerings for sellers, according to Bloomberg.
How it works: Buy with Prime lets merchants sell through Amazon on their own websites.
What it means: Buy with Prime ramps up Amazon’s push into the payments space.
This move advances its push into payments by bringing it one step closer to launching a full-suite online checkout solution for small sellers—which we highlighted earlier as a key innovation for this demographic.
The bigger picture: Buy with Prime boosts Amazon’s competitiveness while resolving some core pain points that could have inhibited its growth.
The firm has been working toward going head-to-head with Shopify, which has ramped up its own payments push and threatens to pull small sellers from Amazon: It will see an estimated $98.77 billion in retail ecommerce GMV this year. Buy with Prime can help merchants’ customize their own product-purchasing experience without hindering sellers’ access to its 165.7 million US Prime users or its own access to seller data.
Sellers may have hesitated to work with Amazon out of unwillingness to share real estate on their checkout pages with a major rival. Though Buy with Prime will still give Amazon access to their data—and perhaps even more of it—the increased control it gives sellers might encourage more of them to take the plunge—in turn broadening Amazon’s ambit.