Buy WITH PRIME

Amazon

The Challenge

While many brands and merchants sell their products on Amazon’s marketplace, many brands and sellers also have their own direct-to-consumer websites. Amazon Pay is a service that lets users checkout on those website using their Amazon account payment methods and addresses. A feature request that frequently showed up in research was to support Prime free shipping and return benefits during checkout on non-Amazon websites. Amazon took on the challenge by launching “Buy with Prime,” a program enabling shoppers to see Amazon product reviews on websites and use their Amazon account to make the purchase, track it, and manage returns.

High level flow of the Buy with Prime checkout experience

Early prototyping and testing of mixed carts scenarios (where customer has both prime eligible and non-prime eligible products in one cart) helped to define the final scope for launch. This capability was eventually de-scoped in favor of a more streamlined approach.

My Role

I was the senior designer who worked on the early stages of this project to identify user needs and develop UI patterns for mobile and web. I partnered with designers on my team as well as the Prime team to ensure the UI supported existing brand guidelines, past research findings, and upcoming feature launches.


Process

This project required a high level of collaboration with stakeholders across Amazon as I was using existing brands like Amazon Prime in a completely new way. Some of the top challenges I had to solve for included:

Lovable Scope. The original scope of this project included complex use cases like checking out with a cart of products that were mixed Prime eligible and non-eligible. To help the product and engineering team reduce and clarify scope I tested early concepts with users to understand what was needed and what was just confusing.

Competing Brand. Both Prime and Amazon Pay teams wanted their brand assets highlighted within the limited button and widget space. To help resolve these conflicts I went through many rounds of design iterations and relied on user research to ensure we were prioritizing the end users’ needs.

Customer Clarity. Buying with Prime off-Amazon was a completely new model for end users and it was important that designs included informational content and clear messaging about how this new program works.

One of the biggest challenges on this project was aligning all the stakeholders on brand and messaging.

Example of launched checkout experience for Buy with Prime

Outcome

Buy with Prime allows third-party brands and sellers to offer their products on their own websites to the large Amazon Prime membership audience. It launched with a limited beta pool of merchants before becoming available to all US merchants a year later. It offers shoppers fast, free Prime shipping and seamless checkout with their Amazon account. Buy with Prime has increased shopper conversion on third-party shopping sites by 25% on average. The program continued to grow after I left the team and now provides merchants several additional benefits, including Amazon handling the product storage, picking, packing, delivery, payment, and any returns, all through Amazon Pay and Fulfillment by Amazon. Merchants are excited about converting more sales and fulfilling shipments more easily, while Prime members love that they can use their Prime benefits on more destinations.