Marketplace Briefing: Amazon’s Buy With Prime ambitions go global with Shopline deal

“Merchants are able to enable Buy with Prime while maintaining control over their brand and shopper experience,” an Amazon spokesperson told Modern Retail in an email statement.

The partnership makes Singapore-based Shopline the first Asia-based e-commerce platform to offer Buy With Prime, and it comes as Shopline seeks to scale its U.S. presence after launching stateside in early 2024. Buy With Prime will help Shopline court more U.S.-based brands and customers. Amazon said in January 2023 that Buy With Prime increases shopper conversion by 25% on average. Shopline’s adoption of Buy With Prime brings it into more direct competition with Shopify, which also provides the feature to its merchants.

“We are actually enabling global companies to leverage Prime to do their fulfillment,” said Christopher Yang, co-president of Shopline. “These could be companies from the U.K., Japan, Korea, and mainly China and Taiwan.” 

Founded in Hong Kong in 2013, Shopline has a stronghold in Asia with over 600,000 merchants, including Lush, Chi Chi London and In the Style. The company sees Buy With Prime as a lever to help international sellers enter the U.S. market by using Amazon’s infrastructure to fulfill DTC orders without the cost of building out local logistics. Yang said the company is on track to reach as much as 500 U.S.-based merchants this year, with expectations to double or triple that count annually. 

“They could build a site and put some ads behind it and test to see if their product will perform well, without having to set up a physical 3PL supply chain in the U.S.,” Yang said.

Amazon’s Prime button push

For Amazon, the partnership is another way to extend its fulfillment and advertising reach outside its own marketplace. Initially launched in April 2022, Buy With Prime has steadily expanded to major brands like Adidas, Fossil and Laura Mercier, Modern Retail previously reported. In September, Amazon said it increased the number of Buy with Prime merchants by more than 25% year over year.

Expanding Buy With Prime is also a way for Amazon to stay indispensable to global brands as President Donald Trump ratchets up his trade war, including sky-high tariffs aimed at China. 

Amazon opened Buy with Prime to all sellers in January 2023 as a way to help Amazon get a cut of sales that happen beyond its own marketplace, especially as a growing number of brands have sought to sell through their own websites and rely less on Amazon to drive sales. Millions of merchants sell on Amazon, accounting for more than 60% of the company’s retail sales and $156 billion in revenue Amazon rakes in from the fees it charges those sellers.

Amazon has previously toyed with various ways to pitch itself as a valuable partner to DTC brands. For example, Amazon Webstore was an early attempt from the company to compete with Shopify and get brands to use Amazon’s tools to build their e-commerce sites. Webstore first launched in 2010 and was shuttered in 2015.

Amazon’s latest deal with Shopline builds on those previous strategies to position itself as a retailer partner, rather than a competitor, to DTC brands.

Checkout without borders

According to Anders Piiparinen, senior e-commerce manager at the acceleration platform Pattern, Amazon doesn’t mind where a transaction takes place — as long as it gets a cut. That includes generating advertising revenue from off-site sales, deepening its fulfillment role through Fulfillment by Amazon and tapping into the massive base of Prime members.

“Amazon wants this Prime button everywhere,” Piiparinen said. “They want to own e-commerce, and this is a next step there.”

Buy With Prime offers key benefits for brands from a margin perspective, Piiparinen added. “Rather than paying a 15% fee to Amazon, it’s only a 3% fee on Buy With Prime,” he said. “That 15% to 3% difference — it can be significant.”

Yang said the model resonates with international brands looking to enter the U.S. without a heavy upfront investment. “Amazon provides a very convenient service to Prime members, but FBA is also very expensive,” he said. “There’s always this trade-off between customer satisfaction and margin.”

An Amazon spokesperson told Modern Retail, “FBA remains an average of 70% less expensive than comparable two-day shipping alternatives.”

Early signs point to strong interest from brands, Yang said. Dozens of Shopline merchants were onboarded during a beta period before the launch. “Even with domestic players, it’s hard to beat Amazon’s logistics and same-day delivery,” Yang said. “Especially for premium products, that kind of fulfillment is important.”

What I’m reading

• After initially penalizing sellers for raising prices in response to Trump-era tariffs, Amazon has quietly reversed course, allowing some top merchants to increase prices by up to 25% without losing the crucial Buy Box, according to Fortune.
• To avoid steep Trump-era tariffs on Chinese imports, Amazon and Walmart sellers are stockpiling goods in Canadian warehouses as a temporary workaround, per Financial Times.
• Amazon Prime membership in the U.S. reached an estimated 196 million users in March 2025, reflecting steady 9% year-over-year growth, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which has tracked Amazon memberships since 2014.

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This story has been updated to include comments from Amazon.