Chapter 1: What is the Amazon MCF beta program and how does it work?
There's a new Amazon MCF beta program being dubbed nothing more than confidential product.
Chapter 2: What are the differences between Amazon's Confidential Product and Buy With Prime?
And it's something we just heard about as of yesterday from one of the actual senior product managers at Amazon. This is currently, again, just a beta program is still in the works, so to speak.
Chapter 3: Why is Amazon introducing the Confidential Product feature now?
But what exactly is confidential product?
Well, essentially confidential product is nothing more than being eligible for direct consumer customers on your website to actually ship through prime and receive the same exact prime shipping from fast free directly on the website. So they don't need to be an Amazon prime member.
Chapter 4: What are the eligibility requirements for the Amazon MCF beta program?
So typically speaking on direct consumer websites, if you aren't somebody currently using MCF, you can have either MCF, which is just regular shipping, similar to Amazon acting as a three PL. but they don't ship in that normal two-day window that they normally would if you bought on Amazon with Prime. Or secondarily, you could do a buy with Prime button.
So Prime members can basically shop directly on your website like it is Amazon. But it seems like this confidential product, quote-unquote, allows basically anybody without needing to sign into Amazon Prime to get fast, free Prime shipping directly on the website.
Chapter 5: What potential changes should sellers expect after June 2026?
Now, I think this is kind of interesting, and it says a few things to me. I think the most pertinent of which is that it's showing Amazon is willing to offer Prime services to non-Prime members if... it can hopefully get them those members on the actual platform. Think of it in this same exact logic.
Amazon's probably looking at it and being like, well, this person is shopping on a direct consumer website. They're not shopping on Amazon. So let's offer them an Amazon Prime benefit to try and get them to be like, ah, that was so fast. Maybe I should just order from Amazon next time. So I do think this is kind of interesting in the sense of another play that Amazon does.
A couple of things just to know for some caveats here. The fact that it's going to work with all payment methods, you're not going to have any additional fees through June 30th, 2026. Now, that's very important to note that they say June 30th, 2026, because that likely means that you are going to have additional fees sometime after June 30th, 2026.
You still want to keep this program on your website as well. The support supports expected shopper patterns for your direct-to-consumer channel. So it's just that basically means, hey, you're not going to have to add anything additional like you would with the normal buy with Prime button.
It's just going to do, you know, the typical things of any shipping thresholds, any subscription orders, multi-unit cart building, all of the above, right? So all of these things I think are really interesting. The eligibility, you must be an existing MCF merchant with an integration through SPAPI, WebB, Fulfill, or the Amazon MCF app.
So you can use basically any of the platforms you normally would with MCF for this. But overall, I think this is an interesting move from Amazon. Very clearly, Amazon only ever does things like this when they're trying to further integrate people into the overall Amazon ecosystem, whether that be the seller or whether that be the customer.
In this case, I think it's going to integrate customers a little bit more because, again, they'll get a big package that maybe has some prime tape on it instead of the normal just brown box the MCF would ship. And then on top of that, they may just think the next time, ah, you know what? I think I might just buy direct from Amazon, which I'm guessing is exactly what they're hoping for.
And then on top of that, they're basically getting people to join this program. And then more than likely come June 30th, they're gonna roll something out and say, hey, if you want to continue offering this prime eligibility to your customers, you're gonna have to pay X dollars more on top of your standard MCF fulfillment fees. So very interesting overall program.
Again, I also think the most interesting part is that they say confidential product. They don't actually have a name for this program. It's just confidential products. So overall, interesting beta program. If you got this email, it's something to test out. It's something to try on your direct-to-consumer website.
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