Amazon Brand Store: what it is and why it is a crucial element of the brand communication

An Amazon Store (also called Brand Store) allows merchants (Sellers and Vendors) who have registered their brand on the Amazon Brand Register to create their own miniature e-commerce website on Amazon. The brand store is a free marketing tool, an Amazon space exclusively dedicated to the brand, built with an intuitive graphical interface and easy-to-use models, with no programming skills needed.

The main goal of the store is to provide brands with a custom landing page that allows them to offer a unique and cohesive brand experience to their customers while continuing to sell on Amazon. It is, ultimately, an engaging space – and a unique opportunity to communicate brand values – to provide users of the platform with the most complete shopping experience possible: show the entire catalog (or much of it) of products in one place, highlight best sellers and share additional content and images.

But do Amazon Stores really help improve sales performance?

Yes. Amazon’s internal data showed that:

• Stores with more than 3 pages can increase the average time spent by users by 83%, constituting a significant opportunity for brand awareness;
• They help increase sales per visitor by up to 35%;
• An appropriate communication strategy that provides the periodic updating of brand store content due to seasonality, new launches or promotional events (such as Prime Day) has the potential to register 21% more repeat visitors, with a positive effect on loyalty.

Features, functionality and opportunities

• Brand communication opportunities: a permanent place on Amazon that is completely reserved for your brand and catalog;
• Positive impact on brand awareness: storefronts have become a valuable piece of digital ownership, where brands can build their credibility on the platform with their current customers and tap into a whole pool of potential users who, probably, otherwise would never visit their website;
• Organic Traffic (customizable Amazon URL, Brandname link, off Amazon channels) and Paid traffic to the Store (Advertising);
• Simple structure: no coding skills needed, reduced number of clicks to reach the products, structured menus and graphic and textual modules in high definition useful for the whole storytelling strategy of the brand.

Structure

Each brand store can be created from three available page templates:

1. Marquee;
2. Product Grid;
3. Product Highlight.

Although they vary in style, they all contain the same basic elements, such as the header and footer.

When choosing a page template, it is crucial to consider the purpose you want to attribute to the store: for example, a Product Grid template could be the best to educate the consumer about the product and affect brand awareness, while the model Marquee can help to tell the brand and its values.

Within the pages can then be inserted video content and static graphic content: above all, different navigation paths can be created with the aim of driving traffic depending on the specific goal.

At the reporting level, the Amazon Brand Store Insights dashboard provides brands with store performance data, including sales, an estimate of units purchased by visitors, total orders, average sales per visitor, average units per order, store level and split each live page. You can also view the total number of users who have visited the store or a specific live page over a given period.

Finally, Amazon provides a tag to measure the origin of traffic (organic, sponsored or from other off-Amazon sources), all to sew the user experience based on the specific target audience.

Available modules

The Brand Store is composed of several modules, which can be modified at any time to choose the most appropriate ones based on the brand’s objectives.

If, for example, the goal is to maximize conversion, a page type could be structured as follows: a hero products presentation form together with a series of product modules and shoppable images, to reduce as much as possible the number of clicks that the user must make to add the product to the cart and/or view product variants.

In addition to the menu – which is default and is self-populated every time a new page is created – and the title – which can be different for each section of the store – there is a plurality of models available to be added.

Shoppable images allow to highlighting of up to 6 products within an image. By placing the buttons that highlight the products, it can preview some details of the same and add them directly to the cart, as well as view the product details page.

The best-selling product grid is automatically and periodically updated by Amazon based on sales performance, while the recommended product grid automatically populates individually for each store visitor.

Among the various possibilities of graphic assets that can be inserted, video backgrounds are audio-free videos that are played in loops, with a duration ranging from 2 to 20 seconds.

Amazon guidelines

For the store to go live, it must be consistent with Amazon guidelines:

• Promotional messaging is only allowed when used with the Featured Offers widget;
• Advertising statements in brand stores must be truthful and accurate;
• The content must be high quality;
• You cannot enter contact details such as email addresses, web or phone numbers, social media addresses or QR codes;
• Shipping or delivery information cannot be added.

Advertising tools to promote the store

Once the store is live, the optimal strategy is to promote it by using both free and paid tools.

First, it would be ideal to get Amazon’s organic traffic from the ASIN details pages (as the brand link at the top of the ASIN product detail page can be used to increase traffic to the store): this will increase organic traffic from customers interested in the brand.

Sponsored Brands can then create advertisements on the Amazon search results page to increase the relevant traffic to the store.

You can also place tags to track individual marketing and advertising activities for greater visibility into their performance.

Witailer tips

• Create an attractive and engaging experience: spend time refining the layout and use a variety of content types to create an engaging user experience. Videos, product photographs, lifestyle images, brand assets, and product overviews are great assets to tell the brand’s story, differentiate from competitors, and provide consumers with a complete shopping experience;
• Update content: to support the tool’s performance, it is good practice to keep the content fresh and relevant, periodically taking some time to align the store with the launch of new products, seasonal events or large sales events such as Prime Day, Black Friday or Cyber Monday;
• Design the store strategically: full-width images can be used at strategic points to create impact, for example on the homepage or at the top or bottom of product category pages (using images that are too large could however slow downloading), as well as for CTAs;
• Make the home exhaustive: most users will only visit the homepage, so it must give value to the brand and above all shows a good variety of products (whether it is affordable images or links to product lists). The navigation path must be built based on the traffic data of individual products and the brand store;
• Prefer simplicity: think about the brand store as a website, so it must be easy to navigate (to avoid user frustration) and the subpages must be structured and organized to allow users who browse the entire brand store to easily see the products on sale;
• Optimize visibility from desktop and mobile: all banners and images on the page are not zoomable from a mobile device, so it is advisable to reduce the text in each banner and increase the font (ideally, do not exceed a maximum length of 3 lines and avoid long texts and little overlap). The text must be precise and it must attract the consumer as much as possible to take him towards the purchase.

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