As a brand manufacturer you have to plan for each of these different platforms and channels; some of which have different or overlapping buying teams -- that makes it a little more complicated. Below is an overview of Core vs Prime Pantry to help you decide which is best for your brand.
Core Platform
The core platform enables everyday shopping across millions of items. Customers are typically spear-fishing or searching for one item, rather than building a basket. To that end, Amazon is trying to sell larger quantity sizes. They're targeting an ASP of anywhere between $10 and $15 at a minimum. Given this fact, a lot of brands put their club packs, variety packs and bigger pack sizes on core.
Prime Pantry
Prime Pantry enables more of a consumer-friendly and less bulky size due to its economic model. Prime Pantry strives to be more of a basket-building business, where you build your basket and then a box ships to you for $5.99. And the popular promotion that some people like to offer is free shipping when you buy five or more items.
To address these differences, brands need to design products for the digital shelf. If you take laundry detergent, for example, a 121-ounce, heavy, low cost-to-weight ratio, highly commoditized, widely distributed product is not economically viable for online and shipping to the customer. So Tide has done a really great job of designing for online and creating unique products. They created the Tide Pod, which is a dehydrated, light-weight product. All the other laundry detergent brands have essentially come out with their own type of pod. They've also created bundles, which is cross-category; it's these three items in a box with one SKU. That's also an eCommerce bundle. The last thing they've recently launched is the smart pouch, which ships three in a box -- also very nice for the online format.
Given its uniqueness, you need to ensure that you have an Amazon specific playbook in place. Learn how to build your Amazon playbook by watching our on-demand webinar Driving Business Results on Amazon.
