Thousands of brands adopted Buy with Prime two years after Amazon launched the fulfillment and one-click checkout service in April 2022.

Buy with Prime allows shoppers with a Prime membership to shop on e-commerce websites other than Amazon and check out using their Amazon account. Crucially, Amazon also handles fulfillment, which means Buy with Prime is not a replacement for PayPal, Shop Pay, or Apple Pay but rather a complete e-commerce experience inside a checkout button.

The service grew slowly after launching in April 2022 because Amazon had no integration with Shopify, the hosting platform for the largest pool of e-commerce brands. In August 2023, Amazon and Shopify announced a partnership and launched a plugin for all Shopify merchants a few months later, in November 2023. The previously confusing integration, which Shopify even discouraged merchants about, became painless and quick.

The thousands of merchants that use Buy with Prime are mostly Shopify merchants. Most were already selling on Amazon and used the service to launch a DTC channel or offer a payment alternative on their existing websites. Since Buy with Prime requires inventory at Amazon warehouses, there haven’t been many brands that have deployed it that do not have an Amazon presence.

Anecdotally, Buy with Prime increases conversions. Outside of major retailers, delivery estimates are rare, and Buy with Prime puts them front and center, but also because of “Prime” in the name. Tens of millions of people in the U.S. have a Prime membership, and to them, “Buy with Prime” is self-evident. However, so was Amazon Pay. It is not obvious that Buy with Prime gets the product shipped faster since it’s not an alternative payment method but one tied to a fulfillment service. It becomes obvious once the first purchase comes in Amazon packaging the next day. Yet that invisible benefit is why more brands are not trying it — they would have to send inventory to Amazon. Without them, the flywheel is not spinning.

There are no estimates for the volume of Buy with Prime payments. It is growing but remains niche — the thousands of brands it has is a small drop in the universe of millions of e-commerce websites on Shopify alone. Two years in, the possible increased conversion rate has yet to convince many brands. Adoption is growing, but the service has not become a disruptive force.