How is AI auto-buying impacting Subscribe & Save numbers?
Every CPG brand wants to sign up their shoppers for recurring purchases.
After all, when a shopper subscribes to you, they’re less likely to comparison shop, and their LTV goes up.
On Amazon, the marquee subscription program is Subscribe & Save, where shoppers instruct Amazon to automatically re-purchase certain products at intervals of their choice (every 1 month, 2 months, 6 months, etc).
In exchange, shoppers get a discount of at least 5% per product.
But there’s now a new alternative for shoppers who want to set up automatic repurchases on Amazon: they can simply tell Alexa for Shopping, Amazon’s AI agent, to do it for them.
How does Alexa for Shopping auto-buying work?
Alexa for Shopping allows shoppers to set up all kinds of alerts and automated actions across Amazon (and beyond).
For instance, Amazon buyers can set up Price Alerts, in which Alexa automatically buys a product when the price drops.
This means you as a brand owner might have a long line of shoppers you’ve already convinced to buy your product—but they won’t actually go through with it until you cut your price or create a deal.
This time-delayed purchasing can mess with your analytics and reporting.
Another key feature within Alexa for Shopping is Scheduled Actions, where shoppers can ask Alexa to add products to cart when certain events happen.
Maybe you’ll want to automatically add to cart a new book by one of your favorite authors, or you’ll want to be given a list of gift recommendations a week before Father’s Day.
Or, most importantly for our purposes, shoppers can just tell Alexa to make a new purchase after a time horizon of their choice. Every month. Every quarter. Every first Friday of the month.
This feature is probably great for your LTV and repeat purchase rate.
Instead of needing to take out ads to convince shoppers to subscribe, Alexa will just push auto-purchases for you.
The problem is you don’t get much data on when it’s happening.
Can you track AI-powered auto-buying on Amazon?
Right now, we just don’t have very detailed analytics around Alexa’s auto-buying capabilities.
With Subscribe & Save, you can, through Amazon Marketing Cloud, quickly check how many shoppers subscribe to their products and for how long.
You can also create custom audiences of people who subscribe to your products and exclude them from future Amazon DSP campaigns.
You can’t do this with Alexa. You have no way of determining how many of your shoppers have set up Scheduled Actions or auto-buying for price drops, or how auto-buying is impacting your Subscribe & Save numbers.
You also can’t tailor marketing actions around them.
The only way to really begin to make sense of how Alexa auto-buying is impacting your brand is to analyze the Amazon Retail Purchases data set within Amazon Marketing Cloud.
This gives you a 5-year view of your shoppers—letting you see the frequency with which your shoppers purchase from you, the average interval between those purchases, and more.
While AMC’s 5-year purchase data set won’t be able to tell you how many people literally set up auto-buying within Alexa, it’ll give you a sense of the health of your repeat purchase rates overall.
Let’s say your SnS numbers start dipping. If you still have roughly the same number of repeat purchasers overall according to the Amazon Retail Purchases data set, you can probably assume many of those shoppers just have opted to have Alexa auto-buy for them.
The alarm bells should only start to go off if your repeat purchase rate—or recurring purchase longevity—starts to drop.
