Amazon will give third-party merchants the ability to display Amazon customer ratings and reviews on their own e-commerce sites for the first time under an expansion of its “Buy with Prime” program.
For now, reviews and ratings of products will be read-only on the merchant’s own site, which means the ability for customers to submit reviews will be reserved for Amazon.com, the company said in response to GeekWire’s questions.
“When an Amazon shopper leaves a rating and review for a brand’s product on Amazon.com, the same rating and review will now appear on the product pages of a merchant’s own online store, wherever Buy with Prime is enabled,” the company explained in an announcement Tuesday morning.
Merchants who enable Reviews from Amazon, as the feature is known, will also be able to turn them off on their sites at any point, the company said.
Amazon said Tuesday that it will make Buy with Prime widely available in the U.S. on Jan. 31, moving out of its invitation-only phase. Launched in April, the initiative lets Prime members buy items on non-Amazon sites just as they would on Amazon.com, with benefits including streamlined checkout and free delivery.
In addition, e-commerce platform BigCommerce, which entered into a partnership with Amazon in 2021, announced that it will launch a “Buy with Prime for BigCommerce app” this quarter, giving merchants who use its platform the ability to integrate Buy with Prime on their sites without any custom development work.
Buy with Prime is part of a broader effort by Amazon to extend its logistics and delivery infrastructure beyond Amazon.com, competing with UPS and FedEx.
It’s also an acknowledgement of the growing importance of direct-to-consumer e-commerce sites from brands and merchants. Amazon’s acquisition of e-commerce platform Selz in 2021, for example, was seen as an attempt to counter Shopify’s growth as a platform for independent e-commerce sites.
Buy with Prime is available initially to merchants who use the Fulfillment by Amazon warehouse and shipping service, typically selling on Amazon.com in addition to their own direct-to-consumer sites.
Amazon has more than 200 million Prime members. The company said Tuesday that merchants participating in Buy with Prime have seen an average increase of 25% in shopper conversion, the rate at which website visitors become paying customers.
The upside for Amazon includes additional revenue from a variety of merchant fees, and more insights into the broader shopping habits of its Prime members.
Amazon says merchants receive order information including email addresses to establish direct relationships with customers. The company says it prohibits the internal use of non-public information from Buy with Prime purchases to make decisions about product sourcing, inventory or pricing for its own online store.