Why an Amazon Storefront Should Be on Every Seller’s To-Do List
Amazon stores are a feature of the marketplace that allows brand registered sellers to establish a landing page similar to a personalized website, a place where shoppers might land at the end of their search or where they might start their next search.
This is not a requirement for new brands, so when getting set up on Amazon you should prioritize optimized copy, good carousel images, and inventory planning. But once your product detail pages are in order and the operations are working, the Storefront is a selling feature that should be taken advantage of.
Amazon offers few opportunities for personalization on their marketplace. A good store allows your brand personality to come through, highlighting the products and traits which differentiate you from the millions of other sellers on the search results. We have talked about the A+ page as another instance that allows sellers to present themselves as fully-formed brands rather than one-off listings. But an A+ page is limited in size and it carries the burden of its location.
Because an Amazon Storefront is not on the product detail page (or sitting mixed in with search results like creative ad placements) it has the ability to function essentially as an Amazon-sanctioned Shopify page.
Home Page
Use the Amazon store home page to show your brand how you would like it to be seen. Present your best-selling products or those products you hope to develop into bestsellers, at the top of the page. Use branded lifestyle photography to show your packaging at its most flattering, to show use-cases for your products. Include copy, videos, color palettes, and aesthetics so that shoppers know who they are buying from.
For natural food brands new to the platform who are only listing a few products, it may be enough to have just a home page in your store. There is not a restrictive space limit, so if your product offerings fit comfortably on the home page then feel free to leave it at that.
Beyond the Home Page
If you offer a range of products, flavors, and sizes, then consider using additional pages in your Amazon store to present your full catalog.
As an example, a brand using Amazon’s advertising structure to direct shoppers towards a lower price-point offering might create a store page to show all bulk options. This will allow shoppers who were intrigued by your brand by a single unit offer can see that you also sell a five and a ten pack, for once they’ve established that they love the product.
Otherwise, if your catalog is split out into a handful of product types then each can have its own dedicated page, showing functionality and presenting flavor options for each type.
Links to a brand’s Storefront live under a product’s title.
Think of framing this as though you were a shopper. If one product came across your search results and you clicked into the listing, then decided to explore the brand behind the product, you would click on their store page. Amazon’s greatest functionality is as a discovery tool, where brands can tap into a bottomless pool of new customers. Structure your store’s home page and subsequent tabs as an explanatory tool, so that somebody who has never heard of you before can spend 30 seconds clicking around and know what it is you offer.
The Right Number of Pages to Include
However many are necessary, and no more.
As part of this, consider avoiding redundancy as much as possible. If you can fit your Amazon store into a home page plus two tabs, then don’t make it four tabs just for the sake of presenting something bigger than you are.
A shopper who finds themselves in your store should not have to decide whether they want to click through to buy a product from one page or another. Keeping with our most frequent advice on Amazon, make your store —like your listings— simple because a large portion of Amazon shoppers is just as happy to not have a number of decisions to make. The platform has more options than anywhere in the world, and at the bottom of that funnel, shoppers want to be shown the right option so they can click ‘buy’ and go on with their lives before your product arrives two days later.
Setup
Because it isn’t a necessity to develop a store page before selling on Amazon, it can be easy to ignore while focusing on more pressing needs. But Amazon’s interface makes it fairly simple to create your store page. Once your products are live, take a few minutes to set up the store, and from there it will be relatively easy to circle back and adjust or improve as your Amazon catalog grows or as new imagery or assets become available.
Using Amazon’s Templates
Amazon offers templates that allow layouts from a single image up to 8 images or product blocks.
Amazon offers templates that allow layouts from a single image up to 8 images or product blocks.
Amazon offers various templates to use while setting up your store. Select whichever works best for your intended aim, but if you are using images or videos with specific dimensions then consider how each Amazon template will present any given block of creative to ensure that your videos are not compressed into a square and the frame minimized.
As you set up your additional product type pages or bulk pages, you may find it convenient to list all product options top-to-bottom without any formatting, catalog style. This is a good option only if you have a catalog deep with flavors. Remember that by doing this you are essentially presenting your listings the same as they would look on Amazon’s search results, which removes some of the benefits that the Amazon store is offering.
Shoppable Images
While building out the Storefront, brands are able to select the images that will be presented on their store as well as those products to which the image will click through to. This is a highly useful way to show use case scenarios or lifestyle images of your products.
For images that show multiple products, there is an option to make one image click through to various product detail pages. Amazon calls them “interactive points” but they will look to your shoppers as dots on the image, hovering over each product or each section of the image, based on how you lay them out. Shoppers can click these interactive points and be taken from that one image to the appropriate product detail pages.
Desktop vs Mobile
While your Storefront will be accessible from both mobile and desktop devices, the design can only be optimized for either desktop or mobile. Elements will be shifted around based on the templates that you are using, and you do not have control to switch them around for the mobile design without affecting the desktop design. It’s a small and irritating quirk.
The builder does allow you to switch between desktop and mobile previews, so you can see how the design will change.
As of 2020, the numbers trended slightly towards desktop as the preferred mode of browsing, so we lean towards this when designing Storefronts.
Whichever you design for, it is worth taking some time to review your work from the other interface. It won’t be perfect, but it should be serviceable.
Approval
Only brand registered sellers are able to create an Amazon store page. For any natural food brand selling its own product on Amazon, being brand registered is a must. It gives you control over your listings and offers perks such as Amazon Stores and A+ content. Getting a brand registered requires you to have a professional seller account and to register a trademark with Amazon for your products.
For sellers already in Brand Registry, gaining approval from Amazon for your store page should be simple and quick. Once the design is created, the store is submitted to Amazon’s review process which generally takes 24 hours and very rarely ends in rejection by Amazon’s automated systems. After this, the Storefront will go live.
Utilizing Store Insights
From Amazon’s advertising dashboard, click the dropdown on the left and go into the ‘stores’ interface. From there you will see a button to ‘see insights’. This is a feature to use once your store page has been live for some time and can help sellers understand what is or is not working in their design and layout.
It’s worth taking some time to poke around within the insights to understand what information Amazon is providing and how it might be useful. For instance, by clicking on ‘pages’ on the left-hand side of the page and then scrolling down to the bottom table, sellers are provided with a cross-section of which pages are being viewed the most and which are converting.
There are many places in Amazon’s labyrinthine marketplace where sellers can find data that might help them optimize performance. Unfortunately, these instances are all spread throughout the website’s backend and can be difficult to decipher. The insights section of the Amazon store is mostly a snapshot of the information Amazon likely keeps, but it is fairly intuitive and allows for a glimpse into how your store performance might be improved. Set a calendar reminder to check back in regularly to see how this information can be utilized.
Amazon Posts
This is an interesting section of your Amazon store. Posts are a form of social media on Amazon. There might be a time when this interface has its own home, separate from the Storefront, but for now, it seems to be the best fit.
For brands with an existing social media presence, Posts offer a chance to reach a broader window of Amazon shoppers with very little additional effort. By scheduling Amazon Posts using creative that has already been curated, you are positioned to drive brand discovery beyond Amazon’s search results and beyond the paid advertisement that you funnel shoppers to your detail pages any given month.
This functionality is still in the beta phase, but considering the traffic Amazon boasts and the purchasing trust shoppers put into brands that are well-established on the platform, there are decent odds that Amazon Posts gains momentum. If nothing else it is a low-effort avenue to expand and establish brand personality.
Managing Your Store
Once the space has been set up, you’ll want to check in periodically to ensure it remains up to date.
If you begin selling new products or introduce new size options or flavors, those should be introduced to your store. If seasonality is a part of your business then be sure to change your store to highlight which products are most relevant to shoppers at any given moment. Old inventory can be removed, and especially out-of-stock products should be taken out of the Storefront so shoppers are not clicking through an image into unavailable listings.
On a marketplace where updating listings can be a form of long-tail torture, Amazon Storefronts are a free and easy-to-edit feature giving your brand a chance to present itself as something other than a title and the main image.
Stores might be easy to overlook as you wade through the infinite other aspects of running a business and selling on e-commerce. But sellers with the ability should take some time to establish a store, establishing themselves as professional and trustworthy sellers of quality food products.