Imagine walking into your favorite store: maybe it’s a sleek, minimalist Apple store, a modern, elegant Williams Sonoma, or an eclectic, bohemian Anthropologie. Each offers a different sensory experience, and each one is unique from the others. Your Amazon brand store is no different.
Benefits of an Amazon Brand Store
Not only does an Amazon brand store add credibility to your brand, it also differentiates you from the competition and, much like a real brick and mortar store, draws customers in and allow them to shop your full line of products away from the competition.
Here are the main reasons why you should consider building an Amazon brand store:
- Differentiate your brand from the competition
- Advertise without direct competitors
- Increase brand awareness and familiarity
- Build stronger relationships with customers
The goal of any brand store is to create a lasting impression. Make sure shoppers remember your brand and want to come back and buy again. In this post, we’ll cover the critical steps to building an Amazon brand store, as well as additional resources you can turn to for help.
Is a Brand Store Worth it?
Amazon leaned into promoting brand stores in the late spring of 2020, and the effect was immediate. Our partners who took advantage of this feature saw significant improvements in key brand awareness and conversion metrics, including:
- 64% Increase in Visits
- 67% Increase in Orders
- 99.9% Increase in Sales
Best of all, building a brand store is a quick, straightforward process. We’ve already covered the detailed specifications of brand stores in a previous post, and we’ve even hosted a live webinar on this same topic. It’s easy to build a not-so-great brand store with generic copy, boring graphics, and outdated images. As we’ve discussed previously, putting the extra effort into well-written copy and high-quality imagery not only creates a better customer experience, it also positively affects your ranking.
Compared to rigid specifications of product listings, Amazon brand stores offer a lot more freedom, and SEO and keyword placement are less critical, so you can really cut loose and have fun with the words on the page. Your Amazon brand store is an opportunity to show off your unique brand voice and style with playful wording and specific color palettes, and you can easily change your store for seasonal themes or promotions.
Start with Brand Voice
When building a store from scratch for our partners, we’ll take inspiration from the website or social media presence to get an idea of how a brand communicates to their target audience. This is the best place to start when building your store, especially if your brand already has an established presence on social media.
If you’re uncertain about how to promote your products and brand on Amazon, do some competitor research. Pay close attention to what they are doing well and look for opportunities to set your brand apart. Category is another important consideration. With some categories, a lot of the stores look VERY similar. You may choose to homogenize and fit in with the pack, or you could decide to create a store that stands out. “That’s the beauty of brand stores,” says Kenley Seefeld, Kaspien’s Partner Success Manager. “Once we have a direction, we can create just about anything.”
Ask the Right Questions
Having a brand store link on your product pages ensures customers are redirected to a page with all your products in one place. This is an opportunity to curate their shopping experience and tell them more about your products or your brand. Once you have your brand registry in place and you are ready to set up your Amazon brand store, take a moment to ask a few key questions:
- Who are you trying to appeal to?
- Are you trying to tell your brand story or sell products?
- What segments do you typically break products into?
- Do you have additional instructional/lifestyle videos you’d like to feature?
Videos are particular and important consideration. On a detail page, you’re only allowed to have one video. If you have lifestyle or instructional videos, a brand store is a great place to feature those videos. This is an ideal solution for brands with high return rates. You can cut down on returns by providing instruction and context through additional video assets. You can also put videos on a brand store that are longer than a minute.
Make Finding Products Easy
Like their real-world counterparts, an Amazon brand store is a complete, branded experience highlighting your entire line of products. For this reason, Seefeld recommends creating a single brand store to house all your products underneath.
Amazon offers three basic templates, plus, a blank template option that allows you to create your own. When choosing a template, think about how you want your customer to experience your products:
- Marquee – This option acts as a brand gateway page and is excellent for telling your brand story.
- Highlight – This template displays products and content, providing an opportunity to tell customers more about specific categories within your catalog.
- Product Grid – This is a great option if you want to feature a large number of products without going into detail on categories or specifications.
- Blank – The blank template gives you the most freedom to build your store from scratch exactly how you want.
Once you know how you want to feature your brand and your products, use the template to guide the shopping experience. For example, if you sell pet products, you might separate product pages by cat, dog, etc., or you might choose to separate by collars, leashes, chew toys, treats. If you are in the hardware category. You may need to separate them by specific sizes and materials, and you can create as many sub-sections as needed to help customers find exactly the products they need.
Let Your Brand Shine
Your brand store is the best place to be creative on Amazon. You have so many options to advertise and showcase your products in your brand voice. You can be cheekier and have fun with your language (keeping in mind there are still some requirements and guidelines related to sales and discounts) to create a very unique look and feel. This is also an opportunity to use branded sayings and puns in a way that you can’t use on your product listing.
Also, you can create variations of your brand store with seasonal color schemes and promotions. For example, you want to change the look and feel of your store in the weeks leading up to Prime Day, Black Friday, and Christmas. Keep in mind that submissions do take a little bit longer during these high-traffic holidays, and rejections are more common. Once you submit your store for publishing, it goes through a review process at which point Amazon will either accept it or request changes. This process usually takes about 24 hours, but it can take 2-3 business days depending on the volume of requests going through
Leverage Your Amazon Brand Store
As with many of the tools and resources on Amazon, you can use your brand store to test different options and influence specific metrics. For example, if you’re trying to increase brand awareness, use links and campaigns to drive customers to the brand store. If you’re doing a product launch, drive to the detail page. If you’re unsure, test both and see which has the higher conversion rate.
Although they’ve made some great strides in improving analytics, Amazon doesn’t always have the best data for this. Part of what agencies like Kaspien provide partners is a more detail regarding which products have the most engagement, taking extra steps to calculate and extrapolate the data so you can make more informed decisions. Use your brand store analytics to create better targeted campaigns, or use your campaigns to better optimize your brand store.
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