Amazon.com isn’t just endless pages of search results. It’s also home to Amazon Storefronts, multi-page branded stores that allow customers to shop the catalog of a specific brand.
Much like a direct-to-consumer website, these one-stop-shops allow sellers to showcase their products, brand, and value proposition through a completely custom branded experience.
Amazon Storefronts provide opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and educate. They are also free from competitor advertising, so sellers who invest in creating a compelling storefront can see a dramatic lift in sales conversion.
But how do you create an Amazon Storefront? And how do you ensure that your design stands above the rest? We cover that and more below.
Amazon Storefronts are multi-page stores that exist within the Amazon platform to help Amazon customers shop products from specific brands. Stores are designed and operated by the brand through their Vendor Central or Seller Central account or through an Amazon agency partner.
Creating an Amazon brand store is free and available to all 3rd party sellers and 1st party vendors who are enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry.
On Amazon, customers can access a brand’s storefront in two ways:
Off of Amazon, customers can be linked to a brand store in a variety of ways including through display advertising campaigns, social media campaigns, and email marketing campaigns.
Stores appear on Amazon’s website as well as their Amazon mobile app, and are built with a responsive design so they can fit all device screen sizes.
There are many reasons to create an Amazon Store. Here are just a few:
Brand Stores are also a great way to engage with mobile shoppers. According to Orca Pacific’s 2020 Amazon Prime Member Survey, 45% of Prime Members purchased on Amazon using mobile device in the last year.
As that statistic continues to rise, so will the importance of offering a mobile-friendly virtual experience that is immersive, responsive, and allows Amazon customers to scroll and shop your brand with ease.
Setting up your Amazon Storefront is a relatively simple process. This is especially true if you have an established Seller or Vendor account and are already brand-registered.
But for brands that are starting from square one, you should begin by creating your professional Amazon seller or vendor account.
Amazon requires all Amazon Sellers to provide proper documentation and identity verification prior to setting up an account. This includes the name, contact information, ID verification, and bank information of the primary brand owner (for sales deposits every two weeks).
Sellers will also need to provide information about their business such as address, registration state, company structure (LLC, corporation, etc.), and Federal Tax Identification Number.
Lastly, Amazon will ask for credit card information with which to charge the $39.99 monthly fee.
Other costs associated with becoming an Amazon Seller are dependent on several factors such as fulfillment method.
Click here to sign up for an Amazon Seller account.
(If you are interested in selling wholesale to Amazon, check out: Becoming an Amazon Vendor).
Amazon Brand Registry is a program designed to give increased control to reputable brands on the Amazon platform. Enrollment is a prerequisite for creating a Brand Store, along with several other Amazon programs.
According to Amazon, brands must have a “registered and active text or image-based trademark” in order to be eligible for Brand Registry.
To enroll your brand, follow the 5-step process outlined in our Guide to Amazon Brand Registry.
Be prepared to answer the following questions:
(Note: Images in the following section are from Amazon’s Store Creation Guide. View this guide to get specific tile dimensions and more in-depth information about various store components.)
Once enrolled in Brand Registry, the fun begins of actually designing your Amazon Store.
Much like A+ Content, Amazon’s other premium content offer, Amazon Storefronts are built with easy-to-use templates—no coding necessary.
First, navigate to “Manage Stores” from within the Amazon Ad Console or Seller/Vendor Central.
You will then be shown a list of the brands under your account that are registered and eligible for creating an Amazon Store. Upon selecting your desired brand, you will be directed to Amazon’s Store Builder console in which you will design your store.
On the left side of the console is the Page Manager toolbar that will allow you to add, edit, move and delete pages from your Store.
You should be prompted to begin designing your Store by selecting your homepage template.
There are three page template options: Marquee, Product Grid, and Product Highlight. Although they vary in style, all page templates contain the same basic elements: content tiles between a header and a footer.
When selecting a homepage template, consider the purpose of your store. Are you trying to educate customers about your product? Do you have video creatives that tell your brand story? Or do you have a few best-selling items that you want to promote front and center?
Learn how Amazon Storefronts can be used for selling premium products
Whatever your approach, there are pros and cons to each homepage theme. Don’t get too caught up here, as you can always change your homepage theme later on.
Once you’ve established the layout of your homepage, you should build out your store levels. These are the pages within pages that customers click through as they browse and shop.
Stores are allowed a maximum of 3 levels, including the homepage.
Be strategic when creating new pages. Take time to map out how you want customers to interact with your store and curated collections of products. It can be helpful for most brands to reference their direct-to-consumer website and mirror the style and page logic.
Design with ease-of-navigation in mind. With 3 levels at most between your customer and the product that they may want to purchase, be sure not to complicate the customer journey or use unintuitive categories for your pages.
Once you have your levels built and assembled into a hierarchy, it’s time to add content tiles to each of your store pages.
Content tiles are spaces for content that customers can interact with on each page of your Amazon store. They include:
With a wide variety of tile types, there is ample opportunity to create differentiation between your Amazon store pages. The key is to be intentional about your usage of each tile. Don’t use the Video Tile, for example, if you want the customer’s full attention to instead be on the surrounding product tiles.
To add tiles to your pages, navigate to the Tile Manager in your Store Builder. The Tile Manager allows you to add, edit, move and delete tiles from the current page.
It’s best practice to draw on your existing assets when building out your store pages.
Perhaps you have a video and various lifestyle images for a new product line. Create a store page for the product line and fill in content tiles with your existing assets.
Once you have completed adding in the content tiles and assets for your store pages, use the ASIN search tool in the Store Builder to add individual products to product grid tiles and other content tiles.
With all of your pages, tiles, and products fleshed out, your store should be looking like a storefront worth shopping.
For more design inspiration, read our article: Top 5 Best Amazon Storefront Examples.
Before you leave the Store Builder console, you should review your Amazon store for issues, including:
Try using the Preview tool in your Store Builder console to get a view of how customers will be seeing your store once it is live.
After ensuring that your Amazon Storefront is free of errors, you will need to submit your store for Amazon’s review. Amazon reviews stores before publishing to ensure that customers will have a positive experience.
Amazon’s review process can take anywhere from 1-3 days.
Rejected stores fail to meet Amazon’s content acceptance policy and should be adjusted and resubmitted for review. You can find the status of your store in the Status Bar of your console.
An Amazon Storefront can’t be effective at driving brand awareness and sales if customers never find it in the first place. That’s why it is crucial to build out an Amazon Advertising strategy which drives store traffic from various locations along the customer journey.
Sponsored Brand advertisements are an effective way to increase visibility from the Amazon search page while driving traffic back to your Amazon store.
Consider breaking out multiple Sponsored Brand campaigns driving to subpages of your brand store. If you have a product line that you are promoting, feature the best selling products from that line in an ad creative and link back to the corresponding store subpage.
Another effective strategy for driving store traffic utilizes Amazon DSP to target in-market shoppers across the web with display ads that link back to your Amazon store.
This approach is particularly effective because it targets audience segments using 1st party data from the Amazon platform, ensuring that the customer’s being driven back to your Amazon store are highly qualified to purchase.
Other best practices to drive traffic include:
You can track traffic and sales on Amazon from external channels by using Amazon Attribution.
Sellers can better understand their Amazon Store performance by using the new “Insights” tab of the Amazon Stores interface. With this tool, sellers can analyze daily visits, page views, page views per visitor, sales, and sales units. Metrics are broken out by page and traffic source, providing visibility into your advertising strategy so you can identify new opportunities to drive store traffic.
Sellers can also see which marketing sources are generating the most Store page views and sales – including organic Amazon traffic, Sponsored Brands, or external links such as from social media or email marketing channels.
You can also create a source tag for your Store URL and use it to measure traffic from specific external sources.
All Brand Store data is refreshed every 24 hours. Data is available by day or over a selected time period, and can be exported in a CSV file.
Nearly 80% of Amazon shoppers use the Amazon platform to discover new products or brands. Amazon Storefronts give sellers a unique opportunity to make an introduction to those customers with a compelling branded experience.
Storefronts are key elements in a complete Amazon content strategy. Without them, brands are losing out on a massive sales opportunity.
Luckily, setting up a best-in-class brand store isn’t a years-long process reserved for a team of coders. Rather any brand that is Brand Registered can use existing creative assets to build an engaging storefront for Amazon shoppers.
Partner with our team at Orca Pacific to get started building your Amazon Storefront today!
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