Holiday Kicks Off Today With Amazon, Walmart, and Target Deals

If you've been waiting to start your holiday shopping, well, now's your chance. Major deals are happening across Walmart, Target, and Amazon.

From this observer's seat, the deals are quite strong across all the sites now.

I am noticing a few other things happening across the landscape. One is the increasing prevalence of Buy With Prime. I noticed Wyze (who has been one of the original boosters of Buy With Prime) doing a few things that I haven't seen very often in the wild:

* A Buy With Prime cart whereby you can add multiple Buy With Prime items from the same store.

* Improved branding for the cart and promotional treatment for Buy With Prime items. This includes Big Deal Days branding, which is quite prominent. (Note I haven't seen a Buy With Prime landing page for this Deals event yet.)

If you Checkout with Buy With Prime on a Shopify store today, you are still waiting to get the new promised experience going over Shopify payment rails, you are getting the same experience from launch, which goes directly to an Amazon checkout. So, a transition period.

This will change when the new Shopify app releases from Amazon.

One continued downside for the Buy With Prime implementation (until the new app is released) is the multiple cart scenario, whereby there are now two carts on the Wyze website. One for Amazon BWP items, and one for regular items. To the average shopper, this can get confusing fast.

Remember, in other stores like BigCommerce (one of the first Buy With Prime partners), and WooCommerce, you can likely even hide the native cart to remove the multiple cart issue if that's how you want to do business. It gets to the friction and differentiation points between the platforms.

From Shopify's point of view, the checkout is the main point of differentiation and is non-negotiable.

From the point of view of other platforms, this kind of decision is one a merchant should be able to make on their own.

Speaking of which, Buy With Prime is still a huge merchant flashpoint, period. On one side, you have the DTC-focused folks who are loath to consider giving up control to Amazon -- particularly in the "crown jewels" of their primary customer.

On the other side, you have many merchants who already have a significant amount of inventory stored with Amazon, or who don't want to be shipping eaches on their own, who are starting to test out the program on their sites. These folks are happy to have Prime messaging to boost shopper trust on their sites.

It will be interesting to see the long-term studies on this; each brand will have a different point of view, and you're in a situation where many on either side can't imagine why the other side feels that way. It is that polarizing in the DTC community.

For Shopify's part... from Tobi's recent interview at the All In conference, he is preparing for either eventuality with Shopify's recent Buy With Prime partnership.