What I Learned Browsing Amazon Buy With Prime Day Deals
While Buy With Prime was announced last April, it's easy to forget the program has yet to be live six months. This year's Prime Day gives the program a chance to see what the team has been doing, and here's what I've learned so far:
* Amazon has a Buy With Prime deals page on their website - they are driving traffic off Amazon for Prime Day.
* I counted up all brands and deals by category.- health, electronics, beauty, home dominated by far.
Breakdown of # Brands / (Deals) by Category:
Health: 22 / (119)
Electronics: 19 / (130)
Beauty: 18 / (106)
Beauty: 1 / (1) [not a mistype]
Home: 15 / (169)
Grocery: 10 / (62)
Outdoors: 8 / (72)
Pets: 4 / (42)
Fashion: 7 / (146)
Kids: 4 / (160)
* I would say 99% of brands I do not recognize. The top brands I do recognize with deals: Wyze, Anker, Targus -- primarily in electronics and 2 of the 3 are essentially Amazon-native brands that have broken out.
* Many of the products on Prime Day Deals are what I call "first-purchase profitable", even despite the fees. I estimate many of these items have 80+% gross margins.
Quite a few of the items have virtually unprovable benefits and charge high prices. Health and Beauty are rife with it.
If Health and Nutrition ever get real FDA regulation, a lot of D2C and marketplace brands are in trouble. Until then, to the moon!
* The most damning critique of Buy With Prime is of all the deals I looked at, I couldn't think of a single item that wasn't already flooded on Amazon. For Amazon, that may be a win because Buy With Prime badges are on D2C websites that weren't there earlier, but is it truly a win for the consumer?
Still unclear at best.
* I noticed someone hacked the Beauty category somehow on the Deals page - it's listed twice. Perhaps someone created an extra browse node by mistake?
* At some times while browsing these deals and I closed my eyes, I could literally be on any deals website -- AliExpress, Wish, Shein, you name it.
I understand this is Amazon's selection these days, but more and more I don't feel that a third-party-most future is beneficial for Amazon. Third-party selection can easily move and will go where the traffic goes.
Strategic selection is first-party and if other categories are moving to a "fast-fashion" model based on social media trends, is Amazon already behind the times?
* If Buy With Prime is to be successful, it needs to drive a "surprising" amount of traffic to a D2C website.
If it does not do this, I have difficulty believing this program will be around in 5 years. The majority of Amazon's focus with this program should be in improving MCF packaging and traffic generation (and to a lesser degree, advertising).
* My favorite brand by far is journaling company "New Mindset Who Dis?" selling a few self-help books. lol @ name
