This post is by Chris Turton, an ecommerce and Amazon consultant.
All sellers with Brand Registry approval can now create their own “store” on the Amazon website – a set of pages they design themselves and that is dedicated to their business and products.
Sellers have been asking for this for a long time. Amazon is a very search-driven website, and it’s impossible to build your brand when customers are swamped by hundreds of competing products. A dedicated store page addresses this problem, by giving sellers their own “home” on Amazon.
Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon Storefronts, from creating your own store to getting the design approved and monitoring its performance.
View Top Amazon Seller ToolsWhat is an Amazon Storefront?
Amazon Stores, or Storefronts, is a free feature provided by Amazon to businesses approved for Brand Registry, meaning that they are brand owners with a registered trademark and have successfully completed the Brand Registry application process.
Amazon provides tools for sellers to design their Store themselves, by creating pages and adding modules in a similar way to A+ Content for product listings.
The result is a dedicated set of pages on the Amazon website that showcases the company and its products, linked from each of the brand’s product pages. It provides a similar experience to what you might expect on the business’s own website.
Note that the official name for this program is “Amazon Stores”, but this has led to some confusion. Amazon has its own physical stores in the US (including Amazon Go and Amazon Books) so some people use “Amazon store” to mean one of Amazon’s brick and mortar shops.
Also, many Amazon sellers refer to their selling account (and overall presence on Amazon) as their “store”. As a result, you will often hear “Amazon Storefront” or “Amazon Brand Store” being used to refer to store pages. Even Amazon has used these terms interchangeably.
How do I create an Amazon Storefront?
Sellers create an Amazon Storefront themselves, using a set of “Store builder” design tools within Seller Central. It’s a visual process, with no coding involved.
The main components of an Amazon Storefront are:
- Pages – the store’s webpages, which also define the navigation menu
- Templates – predefined layouts to help create your pages
- Header – a large “hero image”, brand logo and navigation bar at the top of each page
- Sections – the main horizontal areas or “rows” of a page, which tiles are added into
- Tiles – content widgets used in pages including text, images, videos and products
Here’s an example of the Store builder, for Amazon’s own Basics brand:
The Storefront building process starts with pages. They can be up to three levels deep and the way they are laid out in the page manager also creates the main store navigation menu and submenus.
Templates
Each page starts with a template:
| Product Grid | Displays many products, like a website category page. This is great for showing customers your full range and increasing basket size. |
|---|---|
| Highlight | Showcases a single product such as a new release or an offer. It can also be used for sets of products, and other related content can be included. |
| Marquee | Provides a mix of image and text tiles and can be used as a gateway to other pages, or to tell your brand story and get customers to warm to your values and product range. |
| Blank | Allows you to start from scratch and add any of the available tiles to create your own custom page. |
Templates are really just convenient starting points to build your pages. After creating a page, it can be modified however you want.
Tiles
There are a number of different tiles currently available. These are the key component for adding content to your pages, and include:
| Tile type | Description |
|---|---|
| Product | Shows a single product, including information like the price and Prime status. It links to the product detail page. Product tiles have “detail” and “editorial” variations, and come in different sizes. |
| Image | Shows an image and can be linked to store pages or product detail pages. Four sizes are available, and it can be modified for mobile browsers. |
| Image with text | A variation on the image tile, which includes both an image and text. |
| Shoppable image | With this you can target a part of an image so when the user clicks, product information appears with price, Prime status, reviews and even an “Add to cart” button. Up to six product “interaction points” can be added to an image. |
| Text | A simple text module available in four sizes. |
| Video | Three different sizes are available for product or brand videos. |
| Background video | These play silently in the background and can provide a strong visual impact for your store. They must be between two and twenty seconds long and I recommend a really high quality short video to capture the customer’s attention. |
| Best seller | This automatically shows your top selling products, with four products shown initially and the ability to scroll to see more. |
| Product grid | Displays your products in a grid format, with four to a row on desktop and two to a row on mobile. It includes product titles, images, price, Prime stats, star rating and an “Add to cart” button. You can manually add your products or populate them automatically using keywords. |
| Recommended products | This is automatically populated by Amazon to show recommended products for customers based on their browsing and purchase history. |
| Featured deals | If you have any active deals with Amazon they will automatically appear in this tile. But if you have no deals running it will show “no featured deals”, so should be removed when your deals end. |
Here’s an example of the shoppable image tile. The product callout is shown when the user hovers or clicks on the small black circle:
The store builder has a preview function so you can check how your pages will look during the design process.
Once you are happy with the results you need to click “Submit for publishing” to request approval. Amazon moderates all store designs – they are not published immediately.
You can’t make changes to your design while it is being moderated, so be sure to spend time getting the design just how you want it before submitting. There is also a comprehensive store content acceptance policy, which we will cover below.
What are the benefits of an Amazon Store?
Having your own Amazon Store creates a professional picture of your brand for buyers. It can also help with:
- Up-selling, by helping customers find more expensive versions or larger pack sizes.
- Cross-selling, by highlighting accessories or other complementary products.
- Communicating your brand story to a much larger audience.
We haven’t seen any measurable improvement in search ranking from having store pages, but we have seen conversion rates improve by 5-15%. This means more sales from the same number of views, and a useful improvement in ROI if you are paying for Amazon sponsored products PPC ads.
