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In the battle over online sales, dropped shopping carts are the equivalent of stepping on your own landmines: They're completely avoidable.

Amazon has a tool it thinks will help. This week, the ecommerce giant unveiled its "Buy With Prime" button for Salesforce merchants. Amazon introduced the feature in 2022 as an invitation-only tool available to businesses using Fulfillment by Amazon before rolling it out widely early in 2023. In the fall, it offered the tool to Shopify merchants.

Early results have shown the tool's promise: Amazon data, gathered during the first few months of the feature's rollout, showed that it increased conversion by an average of 25 percent. After introducing Buy With Prime to its site last year, New York City-based weighted blanket brand Bearaby (No. 82 on the 2022 Inc. 5000) saw an uptick in mobile orders especially, says founder and CEO Kathrin Hamm: "It's something that works really well for us."

The average cart abandonment rate for ecommerce sellers is about 70 percent, according to Baymard Institute, a Copenhagen-based user experience research firm. Aside from extra costs--such as shipping and taxes--undesirable checkout processes are some of the biggest reasons customers might abandon their cart: 25 percent of shoppers say they didn't complete an order because the website prompted them to create an account, 19 percent didn't trust the site with their credit card information, and 18 percent considered the checkout process too long or complicated.

Third-party payment gateways, such as Buy With Prime, Apple Pay, and PayPal, present a potential solution to cart abandonment--but adding more options isn't necessarily the answer. "For [a company's] target audience, specific payment methods and buttons convert better," says Dirk Hoerig, co-founder and CEO of the Munich-based digital commerce platform Commercetools. "But putting in 15 of these options would be distracting to the user interface."

So, choose your armament wisely.

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