John Ghiorso of Orca Pacific, a MightyHive Company, shares strategies for creating and advertising your Amazon Storefront in this guest article.
Customers are doing more than just buying products on Amazon—they are full-on shopping. Nearly 80% of online customers use Amazon to do research on new products or brands and 60% say they regularly use the platform to “window-shop.” That is why Amazon sellers are turning to Amazon Storefronts to provide shoppable spaces for their customers to browse.
Amazon Storefronts, also known as Brand Stores, are multi-page digital storefronts that are hosted within the webpages of Amazon to help customers shop the catalog of a given brand.
These one-stop shops look similar to a direct-to-consumer website and allow Amazon sellers to showcase their products, brand, and value proposition through a custom user experience.
Storefronts are also a great way to educate consumers, promote new or seasonal products, generate brand loyalty, upsell or cross-sell, and drive traffic away from competitors.
According to Amazon, Stores with 3+ pages have 83% higher shopper dwell time and 32% higher attributed sales per visitor.
Best of all, creating an Amazon Storefront is free and available to all brand-registered vendors and sellers through their Vendor Central or Seller Central accounts. This is just one of the many Amazon Brand Registry!
Setting up your Amazon Storefront is a three-step process. However, if you are not currently an Amazon vendor or seller, you should instead start by setting up your professional account.
Once your store has been successfully set up and approved, you can begin promoting your Storefront through paid and organic placements both on and off of the Amazon platform.
Amazon Brand Registry is a program established with the purpose of giving reputable brands control of their presence on Amazon. The program has undergone recent improvements and now includes various brand protection tools and resources. In addition, enrollment in Brand Registry is now a prerequisite for creating an Amazon Storefront and for brand participation in several other Amazon initiatives.
To enroll, brands need to first review their eligibility. According to Amazon’s requirements, brands must have a “registered and active text or image-based trademark” to be eligible.
After determining your brand’s eligibility, sign into the Brand Registry portal using your usual vendor or seller credentials. Next, you will need to provide Amazon with information about your brand and products.
Be prepared to provide answers to the following questions:
Once you complete the questionnaire, submit your application. Amazon will then send a verification code to the contact who is linked to the registered trademark in your application. Once that code is sent back to Amazon, your account will be verified and enrolled.
Once enrolled in Brand Registry, you can begin setting up and designing your Amazon Store. Navigate to “Manage Stores” from within the Amazon Ad Console or Seller/Vendor Central.
You will see a list of the brands under your account that are registered and eligible for creating an Amazon Store. Upon selecting your desired brand, you will be directed to the Amazon Store Builder console in which you will design your store.
Select your homepage template and begin creating new pages for your store.
Be strategic when creating new pages. Take time to plan out how you want customers to be interacting with your store and catalog. It can be a helpful exercise to reference your direct-to-consumer website and mirror the design and page logic.
Consider ease of use when laying out your design. With three levels at most between your customer and your product, be sure not to create unnecessary obstacles in the customer journey or use confusing categories for your page titles.
Once you have your different levels built and assembled into a hierarchy, it’s time to add content tiles to each of your store pages.
With several types of content tiles available for use, there is plenty of opportunity to create differentiation between your Amazon Store pages. Once your pages are built out and your products are linked where necessary, you should be left with a new store worth shopping.
Need more inspiration to get started? Check out this Amazon brand store guide.
Before you leave the Store Builder console, you should review your Amazon store for issues. Check for mistakes in spelling or grammar and click on every product tile to make sure they are linked correctly.
It’s also best practice to use the preview tool in your Store Builder console to get a view of how customers will experience your store. Click through the pages as if you were the one shopping for products. Ask yourself whether the flow of the store is easy and intuitive and whether your brand’s value proposition is immediately salient.
After ensuring that your Amazon Storefront meets your expectations, you will need to submit your store for Amazon’s review. Amazon reviews stores before publishing to ensure that customers will have a positive shopping experience.
Amazon’s store review process lasts anywhere from 1-3 days. If your store fails to meet Amazon’s content acceptance policy, it will be rejected. In this case, you will need to adjust your store to meet Amazon’s policy and then resubmit for review.
Once your store is live, it’s time to start driving traffic.
While browsing on Amazon, there are three ways a customer can access your Brand Store:
Off of Amazon, customers can be linked to a Brand Store in a variety of ways including through display advertising campaigns, social media campaigns, and email marketing campaigns.
Sponsored Brands advertisements are an effective way to increase visibility from the Amazon search page while driving traffic back to your Amazon Store.
Consider breaking out multiple Sponsored Brand campaigns driving to subpages of your Brand Store. If you have a product line you are promoting, feature the best-selling products from that line in an ad creative and link back to the corresponding store subpage.
Be sure to test various ad creatives to ensure you’re getting the most out of your placements.
Another effective strategy for driving store traffic is to utilize Amazon DSP to target in-market shoppers with display ads that link back to an Amazon Store.
Unlike Sponsored Brand ads which appear only on the Amazon platform, Amazon DSP allows sellers to reach customers across all Amazon-owned-and-operated sites in addition to all leading publishers’ sites and mobile apps.
This approach is particularly effective because it targets audience segments using first-party data from the Amazon platform, ensuring that the customers being driven back to your Amazon Store are highly qualified to purchase.
For example, a cosmetics brand could use Amazon DSP to create an audience of shoppers who have recently searched for cosmetics on Amazon, viewed a competitor’s product, and/or meet specific demographic criteria. That brand can then serve ads to that audience segment across the web which link back to their Amazon Brand Store.
While paid strategies like Sponsored Brands advertising and Amazon Display advertising are particularly effective at driving Brand Store traffic, many brands also have success generating organic traffic by sharing the link to their Amazon Store on social media channels like Facebook and Instagram.
In addition to social promotion, many brands will link to their Amazon Store through email marketing campaigns and encourage their brand-loyal customers to do their shopping there.
On the cutting edge of organic traffic strategies are those who utilize influencer marketing. Brands are testing the limits of social promotion by encouraging influencers to promote their Amazon Storefronts in social media content. While this method of generating traffic may not be suitable for every brand, it demonstrates the creative possibilities for brands looking to boost the visibility of their store.
Storefronts are key elements of an effective Amazon content strategy. Without them, you lose out on a massive sales and branding opportunity.
Luckily, setting up and promoting a best-in-class Brand Store isn’t a complicated process reserved for big legacy brands. Any brand registered seller who is interested in providing a space for customers to shop their brand on Amazon can use existing creative assets to build an engaging storefront for Amazon shoppers.
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