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Buy With Prime x Shopify Announcement Great For Both Sides: Shopify Maintains All-Important Customer Data

While we have not seen a release from Amazon yet, Shopify announced that it officially signed a partnership with Amazon, which formalizes the relationship between the two parties. A few key deal points:

* Amazon will develop a Buy With Prime App for the Shopify App Store. It's a custom checkout app within Shopify.

* Shopify Payments will process all transactions.

* Merchants who use Amazon's Fulfillment network can install the app.

* Given Shopify's large ownership stake in Flexport, nothing in this announcement seems to change Flexport's status as Shopify's default vendor for Shop Promise

Details are very sparse, so here is some commentary and speculation:

* The fact that "Shopify Payments" will process all transactions does not necessarily mean "Shop Pay." I suspect buyers will still be able to choose Amazon Pay as a payment option, as they can today.

* Prime customers might be able to pull in their Amazon address book natively within Shopify checkout as long as Shopify gets that data without restrictions.

* This resolves a key negotiating point: Whose Terms of Service and Payments solution is primary? In both cases, the answer is Shopify here.

* I have written here that Amazon needed this deal more than Shopify, and I think that's true. Viewing BWP featured websites, all case studies and deal participants (Prime Day, for example) were Shopify merchants.

Without official Shopify support, there is almost not a real Buy With Prime program.

* This partnership still does not solve the core Amazon problem of Buy With Prime: trust and merchant incentives. Buy With Prime has gone to market with a "checkout conversion" message that Shopify already has. OK, now what?

This has not yet been discussed.

* This creates a competitor and alternative to "Shop Promise" (in testing), powered by Flexport. Both services provide fulfillment networks; both will provide consumer promises on product detail pages.

One, uh, is a little more widely adopted. That one is Prime. If I'm Flexport, I might worry. But... Dave Clark CEO of Flexport knows where the bodies are buried at Amazon - as a key logistics leader for years.

* Lost in this news is that BigCommerce announced this in January, so merchants who want a more "unvarnished Buy With Prime experience" also have options. BWP can be implemented on any website with a little work from a system integrator.


Finally.... from Amazon's Point of view, Buy With Prime has always been about leveraging what Amazon does best: logistics. In other words, how do we get more volume through the fulfillment network in a way that also increases the value of Prime?

This does set the table for Amazon to innovate its Multi-channel Fulfillment (MCF), which is sometimes called "Amazon white box" (i.e., your purchases don't come in an Amazon box like traditional Fulfillment by Amazon).