The Orveon team wasn’t totally sure what to expect when it opened up a “Buy with Prime” option to shoppers on bareminerals.com in July 2023. The checkout option would allow consumers purchasing Bare Minerals products on the brand’s DTC channels to have their order fulfilled by Amazon, so long as they are Amazon Prime members.
Once it added the feature to Bare Minerals’ DTC site, Orveon, which also owns the beauty brands Laura Mercier and Buxom, along with Bare Minerals, said the numbers showed a positive reception.
“We wanted to understand whether this was incremental. When we launched Bare Minerals on Buy with Prime, we A/B tested to see if offering Buy with Prime shipping would result in a conversion uplift, and it did. We saw a 40% increase in revenue per visitor, and we saw a [60%] lift in shopper conversion,” said Carney Nir, global vp of ecommerce and digital experience at Orveon. “It wasn’t that we were shifting our business to Amazon. We’re actually converting more people on our DTC site, capturing that consumer data.”
The program was successful enough that Orveon introduced the Buy with Prime option to Buxom in November 2023 and to Laura Mericer in November 2024. Nir said that the program has been critical at a time when fast, free shipping has become de rigueur for many consumers, but costly for brands.
“During the pandemic, beauty brands were really focused on free shipping with every order and trying to be competitive with Amazon or Sephora or what have you,” said Nir. “The reality is, over the last few years, with [customer acquisition costs] going up so much, it’s hard for us to offer free shipping with every order. It just doesn’t make sense in our P&L necessarily.”
The adoption of Buy with Prime means brands are no longer competing against Amazon’s logistics dominance. And for Amazon, the program is a chance to keep its more than 200 million Prime members satisfied even outside of Amazon.com. According to Amazon, 50% of U.S. Prime members indicated that they are more likely to buy again from DTC sites that offer Prime shopping benefits, and brands using Buy with Prime have seen on average a 16% increase in sales after adopting the platform.
“Our position is that we’re neutral on whether a Prime member buys it on Amazon or off Amazon. And increasingly, these omnichannel brands feel the exact same way,” said Peter Larsen, vp of Buy with Prime at Amazon. “They just want to make it available wherever the shoppers may be.”
According to Larsen, the primary goal of Buy with Prime is not to convert outside shoppers to sign up for an Amazon Prime membership, which costs $14.99 per month or $139 per year.
“Our real goal is that we’ve got hundreds of millions of Prime members in the U.S.,” he said. “We want to make them happy, first and foremost.”
Amazon first launched Buy with Prime in 2022 in response to the post-Covid e-commerce boom. Larsen said participating Buy with Prime brands do not have to make any long-term commitment to the program, but they pay Amazon fulfillment fees and Prime service fees, which include 24/7 customer support, as they go. The program also allows brands to simplify their inventory management with DTC purchases coming directly from Amazon’s warehouses.
“[Brands] get to manage the customer data. They have a relationship with the customer over time that they can build,” said Larsen. “They then start seeing it as a way to decrease costs by having one shared pool of inventory in our warehouses that can help serve both their Amazon as well as their off-Amazon channels.”
Amazon did not offer data on how many returning customers buy on Amazon directly after using Buy with Prime or remain on DTC channels. Laura Mercier, Buxom and Bare Minerals products are all available directly from Amazon’s Premium Beauty Store. The brands are also available on TikTok Shop, where they can be shipped with Buy with Prime. But Orveon offers specific perks to customers buying DTC, such as rewards programs and gifts with purchase.
“We expect that acquisition costs are not going to get any cheaper anytime soon. So we’re focused on building up our loyalty and our retention programs,” said Nir. “We see Buy with Prime as another nice way for us to do that. If a customer is after fast, free shipping, we have that available to them. We’re able to segment to customers who may prefer to check out with Prime, and they don’t necessarily need to give up any of the other benefits of shopping on our DTC sites.”
Currently, Buy with Prime is only available to U.S. consumers. Larsen said Amazon is open to expanding the service internationally if the timing is right.
“We’ve always found that if we just go to where the shoppers are and we make them as happy as we can, things work out in the end,” he said.
