Amazon Brand Stores: How to Get the Most Out Of?
Erin Barber, December 2, 2019
[DISCLAIMER]
This post was originally published on the Sellics blog. Any references to Sellics and/or Sellics software, missing/broken images and links will be updated soon.
Getting your products in front of your target audience and nurturing them through the purchase process should be an essential part of your Amazon strategy. Crafting your brand message on Amazon and arming shoppers with all the knowledge that they need to choose your product is no longer optional. It is crucial to your brand success.
Amazon advertising now includes a number of marketing tools to drive brand awareness and create your brand experience on Amazon (including Sponsored Brands and A+ Content). However, one of the most customizable among these tools is Amazon Brand Stores.
What is an Amazon Brand Store?
Amazon Brand Stores is a free self-service tool, that allows sellers and vendors to design their own branded storefronts on Amazon where old and new customers can experience their brand and navigate their product selection. They are highly flexible in terms of structure and content. To use Amazon Brand Stores, sellers and vendors need to be enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.
Sign in to Amazon Advertising to get started with Brand Stores
Amazon Brand Stores: Benefit for Your business
Amazon Brand Stores tool provide numerous benefits to sellers and vendors, such as:
Stronger Amazon branding strategy and brand affinity
Highlight your product’s unique selling points with rich content
Heightened visibility and traffic for your products
Channel for product launches
Below, we walk you through the potential impact of those benefits and their use cases.
Having an Amazon Brand Storefront supports your branding strategy
Example of a Storefront, a typical entry point to an Amazon Brand Store
Amazon Brand Stores tool give you power over how you communicate your brand. All of the templates and themes are highly customizable, rich multimedia content. That means you can match your Amazon Brand Store to the layout of your owned platform or website. Choose from multimedia elements such as (but not limited to) images, videos, pages, headers and footers, content tiles, scroll wheels, and content grids.
The tool allows you to maintain your brand identity so it doesn’t get lost on Amazon. As Amazon is one of the largest, most competitive online marketplaces make sure that your brand strategy stays consistent by designing your own storefront.
Use the customization options to tell your brand’s story, create brand affinity and thereby increase customer loyalty and overall sales volume.
Amazon Brand Stores: Highlight your product’s unique selling points (USPs) with rich content
The highly customizable content gives you the opportunity to tell your brand’s story but also to explain your product’s unique selling points in an interesting and engaging way to increase your conversion rates.
Heightened visibility and traffic for your products
Amazon Brand Stores can increase your traffic. They allow you to get specific products or your product selection in front of more eyeballs because you can use them to harness internal and external traffic.
Internal traffic: the tool can be used as landing pages for Sponsored Brands ads. Direct your ad to one of your Amazon Brand Store pages or your Amazon Brand Store homepage.
External traffic: Amazon Brand Stores encourage organic external traffic from search engines like Google. Each Brand Store has its own, customizable URL e.g. amazon.com/stores/AmazonBasics to help drive traffic directly to your store. These URLs can also be used as landing pages for external campaigns (e.g. email campaigns).
Additionally, Amazon Brand Stores are optimized for both mobile and desktop shopping experiences. Catch the attention of shoppers at home and remote.
Tip: Amazon Brand stores in external campaigns and using source tags
Perhaps the most beneficial perk of having an Amazon Brand Storefront is that your store and its reach extend far beyond Amazon. That means that you can link your Amazon Brand Store and use it as a landing page for any external campaign including emails, newsletters, ads, social media campaigns, blog posts, videos, owned websites, etc.
Use source tags to track the performance of these campaigns. How does it work? Create a custom source tag for your campaign, add it to any of your store page URLs and then use this URL in your campaign.
With the tag in the URL, the visit and any other important KPIs connected to the campaign will be tracked for your reporting purposes in Amazon’s analytics ‘Store insights’ tool.
Tags to your external URLs are unlimited and have no expiry date. However, tags metrics are dependant on two factors:
Only tags in the top 100 ranking by visitors for the time range you assign will be analyzed in Insights and tags must meet a minimum number of visits in order to be analyzed in Insights.
Amazon Brand Stores: channel for product launches
Amazon Brand Stores is a good example of ‘show, don’t tell’ marketing. The customizable visual elements such as content tiles, animated photos, video uploads and more help you design effective product launch campaign.
Additionally, Amazon Brand Stores allow you to reach the maximum number of new and existing customers. Brand Stores are not exclusive to the Amazon platform. You can use them in all of your marketing campaigns. Include them in your ads, press releases, social media platforms and owned platforms. Link them in your YouTube channel or Instagram stories. Reach new markets and audiences easier and faster with a well-designed and well-branded storefront.
Amazon Brand Stores: Structure & Layout
It is up to you to customize and design it in a way that best represents your brand. Amazon provides you with three pre-set templates to fill with content that brings your brand to life (more on that below).
To design your Amazon Brand Store simply log into the Vendor advertising console or into Seller Central.
Here are our tips for an on-brand, revenue-boosting Amazon Brand Storefront:
Amazon Brand Store pages are uniquely customizable, so prioritize rich content and personalization. Also, choose images and videos that clearly demonstrate your products’ use cases.
We recommend using as much multimedia as possible to illustrate rather than explain your brand.
Focus on messaging - make sure that your Brand Store is designed to fit your brand message.
This is the general structure of a brand store:
There are three, unique templates that vary depending on product category:
The Marquee — best for displaying a portion of your product offering with space for feature imagery and descriptive text, copy, or customer quotes.
The Showcase — ideal for a minimal-text, content-rich Storefront that allows for the maximum amount of space for visual imagery and product detail photos.
Product Grid — perfect for businesses that want a simple and clear way to show a wide selection of products, prices and short and concise descriptions.
How to Design Your Amazon Brand Store
First, you will need to register with Brand Registry if haven’t already done so.
Once your brand is registered, log in with your Vendor or Seller account. From the dropdown menu ‘Stores’ choose ‘Manage Stores’ and select one of the three templates detailed above.
Depending on the template that you select, you will have the option to populate the header image, your logo, images, videos, text descriptions and CTA buttons. You have complete control to decide on their navigation order and their general layout and appearance.
Let’s go through the content, piece-by-piece:
The Header image — This is the horizontal image at the top of your Amazon Brand Store. As it is the first content that a shopper will see, it should announce your brand in a clean and clear way. You can use text in your header image but you should focus on displaying a branded image and your logo. Welcome the visitor(s) to your page with this image. The minimum dimension of your header image should be 3000 X 600.
Text or text-based tiles — For tiles with a lot of text, try and be as descriptive but concise as possible. Limit the text to two sentences if possible. Give a unique summary of the product(s), their use case and consumer application.
Here is an example from AmazonBasics:
“AmazonBasics has everyday, low-price items like HDMI cables, batteries, and audio cables to gear up your electronics, as well as home necessities like bed sheets, bath towels, and knife sets.”
Images or image-based tiles — Choose high or professional quality images. Make sure that they are well lit and showcase your product in the foreground. We recommend having a model in the image (when possible) to demonstrate your product in use. This way, potential buyers can see, not guess, how your product(s) function.
Product + text tile — For tiles that have both an image and text, focus on the name of the product. Make sure it is descriptive and keep it short: between 4 and 8 words. We recommend using a 50:50 ratio for the size of the text in relation to the image. Make sure that the image and text are simple so they are not too distracting.
Here is a product name example from AmazonBasics:
“Apple Certified Lightning to USB Cable”
When it comes to designing your Amazon Brand Store, simply follow the process and templates that are in place. Make sure to do a quality or standards check of all of your images and text. Most importantly, however, is to make sure that all of your content is on-brand and clearly communicates how your brand can benefit consumers.
The Amazon Brand Store Submission and Approval Process
Once you have finished designing your Brand Storefront and are satisfied with your branding, click the “Submit for Publishing” button. This will activate the review and approval process. Your Brand Store will be submitted for moderation and editing. Depending on how your Brand Store complies with Amazon’s Brand Store guidelines, you may be asked to make some changes.
To speed up the review process, do a thorough check before submitting your Brand Store draft(s). Make sure to check for:
grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors
an optimized experience across all devices — try to view your Brand Store draft on a desktop, on mobile, and on a tablet to make sure that it is optimized for all three views
check your text, and especially the text in your images, to make sure that they can be easily read (i.e. no blurry or grainy text)
Your draft cannot be edited while it is under review. The review and approval process generally takes up to three days.
Amazon Brand Stores – Conclusion
All that is left to do after you’ve followed this guide is to celebrate your new Amazon Brand Store. You are now well on your way to strengthening your brand and positioning in the minds of consumers.
Amazon Brand Stores are, in fact, a great way to not only enhance the shopping experience but the brand experience. They help you tell the story of your business.
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The electronic storefronts can draw in old and new customers across the Amazon marketplace and beyond. The level of immersion, creativity and, of course, brand experience is within your control. The results for investing some creative energy and time into designing your Brand Store can be increased loyalty and higher sales.