Amazon Stores: A Powerful Tool to Establish Your Brand on Amazon in 2021

Creative content is one of the biggest ways to establish your brand equity and promote shopper loyalty on Amazon.

Now that Amazon A+ Content and Enhanced Brand Content are the norm (and you should really already have those implemented), it’s time to take your branding to the next level with Amazon Stores.

Amazon Stores is a free self-service product that allows brand owners to design and create multi-page stores to showcase their brands, products, and value proposition on Amazon.

So what are the benefits, and how can Amazon Stores work for you? We’ll cover that below.

Jump to the section:

• What is an Amazon Store?
• Amazon Store Examples
• Amazon Store Features
• How to Create Your Amazon Store
• An Overview of Amazon Store Insights & How to Use It

 

What is an Amazon Store?

An Amazon Stores is a free premium content offer on Amazon that vendors can use to exclusively showcase a curated collection of products and elevate their brand.

These stores provide an enhanced brand-centric shopping experience on Amazon on both desktop and mobile platforms.

Amazon Stores elevate the shopping experience by:

• Capitalizing on internal and external traffic sources
• Potential to boost organic ranking on Amazon and increase sales volume
• Ability to promote new products to preexisting customers
• Opportunity to introduce your brand to new audiences
• Giving users a better mobile experience with your brand on Amazon

Amazon Stores give brands the ability to maintain their brand identity on the world’s largest online marketplace. All of those benefits alone are enough reason to invest in Amazon Stores.

But on an even bigger scale, more brands are excited about Stores because this means they no longer have to worry about losing their brand identity in a competitive online marketplace.

Amazon Stores Offer Multi Pages

Multi-page Amazon Stores (up to three levels deep) can be used to exclusively showcase your brand and products. Customize the experience based on what your brand needs.

Brands Can Use Rich Media and Content to Stand Out

Support for rich media and content, such as text and images, helps elevate the shopping experience. Below is an example of an Amazon Store built out for a luxury beauty brand, R+Co:

 

Stores are a significant improvement over the older brand pages, and they allow Vendors to get more creative with the design. Another super cool feature of Amazon Stores is that you can build highly customizable pages showcasing a single or small group of products, perfect for new launches. You can include videos, a slideshow of photos, text, all sorts of content to really push new products.

Amazon Store Example

Amazon Stores are comprised of one or more pages. Each page is comprised of a header and footer surrounding a number of content tiles.

As seen in the example below, each Amazon Store can have multiple levels with several pages at each level:

Pro-Tip: When driving traffic to these new storefront pages via Sponsored Brands, you can send shoppers to the home tab or directly to another category (example: shampoos & conditioners). Each page has a unique URL, so you can enter this specific URL when you create the campaign.

Amazon Stores also allows you to choose from 3 templates (default tiles):

• • Marquee
  • Highlight
  • Product Grid

For examples of Amazon Stores, check out our recent post.

The Amazon Store Manager has four sections including:

Page Manager: Used to create, select, move and delete pages from the Amazon Store

Preview Window: Provides a live view of the current page and can be used to select a tile to edit the Tile Manager.

Tile Manager: Used to add, edit, move, and delete tiles from the Amazon Store.

Status Bar: This provides the current moderation status of the Amazon Store and displays any error messages.

Amazon Store Features

In 2020, Amazon released new features to help advertisers showcase their brand and products with richer, more engaging content experiences (content via Amazon.com).

 

1. Shoppable Collection Images

With shoppable images, you can inspire customers with rich lifestyle images that feature your products in different settings or in collections with complementary products in your portfolio. You can choose to make any of the products in the image shoppable, enabling customers to click on the featured products to see basic information, such as name, price, customer ratings, and Prime availability. They can also add the product to their cart or navigate to the product detail page. This allows shoppers to move from inspiration to purchase in just a few clicks. We recommend using one to five: don’t overdo it. Showcase your best sellers, otherwise, you’ll cover up the image and overwhelm the shopper. Be cognizant of where you’re placing the dots. Also, be aware that on mobile, the dots might move slightly from desktop to mobile, so make sure you preview across devices to ensure they’re in the right spots.

Shoppable Collection Images are your opportunity to highlight great photography but also keep your Store creative shoppable and drive sales on a number of products.

– Hiram Cruz, Creative Director at Tinuiti

 

2. Images With Text

You now have the choice of adding text overlays to images. This capability lets you add descriptive text to images—with customizable location, size, alignment, and color—to better describe products or selections you want to showcase. And the text on images can improve the Store’s search engine optimization (SEO), which may increase traffic to the Store from third-party search engines.

 

3. Bulk and Out-of-Stock Product Management

Instead of uploading products individually, you can now upload products in bulk to your product grids and featured-deals tiles. You can also opt to automatically hide any products that are out of stock, optimizing the shopping experience for customers.

 

4. Amazon Store Scheduling

You can now publish updates at scheduled dates and times, allowing you to plan ahead and align your Store’s publishing schedule with new releases, seasonal changes, and brand updates. When you submit your updated Store for publishing, you can request a date and time at which the changes will be live to customers.

 

5. Links to Stores

Amazon has launched a new way for Amazon shoppers to discover relevant Stores. In addition to the products featured on the simple landing page of your Sponsored Brands ads, Amazon will now add your brand logo at the bottom of the page, which customers can click to go to your Store. They are also experimenting with other ways for shoppers to discover your Store on Amazon. For this reason, it is important that you upload a brand logo in the Store builder (if you haven’t already) and keep it updated.

 

6. Background Video Modules

Amazon had the option to add video but what makes this unique is that it audio plays and loops. In the past, you had to click on it, but this one just plays and it’s effective to draw attention early on so we like to leverage above the fold. We recommend you keep your video to five or six seconds and be cognizant of the loop: meaning you need to make sure you have a smooth transition. Additionally, to capture shoppers’ attention, try using it above the fold, but make sure you don’t push your products too far down the page.

 

7. Store Version Control

Version control of your store is a feature that emerged in 2020. In the past, it was impossible to revert back to a previous version of your Amazon Store once you made edits. Now, not only can you save your previous version, but you can use the scheduling feature to keep content fresh.

For example, if you have an upcoming event such as Black Friday, you may want to edit your store to feature certain deals. You can create that version for the event and schedule a time frame so that it can temporarily update for the event and then revert back to your previous version without having to redo your store to get it back to where it was. This will allow you to get more fresh content on your store rather than just using evergreen content. Just make sure you have a version with no end date as your backup so your scheduled versions have something to revert back to!

“The ability to control store versions and schedule updates has changed our approach and freed us up to be more creative with temporary and fresh changes without creating a lot of issues when we need to revert back.”

– Hiram Cruz, Creative Director at Tinuiti

 

How to Create Your Amazon Store

 

1. Register Your Brand With Amazon

 

Before you can begin creating beautiful Amazon Store content (or even EBC, A+, and Sponsored Product Ads), you’ll need to register your brand using Amazon’s Brand Registry.

 

 

To register your brand, you’ll need:

• A registered trademark for your brand that appears on your products or packaging.

 

• The ability to verify yourself as the rights owner or the authorized agent for the trademark.

 

• An Amazon account. You can use an existing Amazon account (credentials associated with Vendor or Seller Central) or create a new one for free.

Once your brand is registered, you can navigate to Manage Stores from within Ad Console or Seller Central to set up your first Amazon Store.

 

Once selected, you will then be prompted to follow additional steps, including selecting your homepage template.

There are four different Store themes available:

 

 

 

Once you’ve established your store homepage, it’s time to build out additional pages based on your catalog categories, best-selling products, deals, and more.

You’ll want to build out your pages much in the same way as you would your own ecommerce website; make sure that navigation is simple enough for customers to easily find what they’re looking for.

 

4. Add Content Tiles To Each Page

 

Once you’ve established a hierarchy of pages for your customers to navigate to, it’s time to add content tiles to each page.

 

 

Content tiles are content that customers can interact with on each page of your store.

• Titles
• Images
• Product grids (e.g., best sellers)
• Video
• Galleries
• Navigation

 

 

 

 

 

According to Amazon, once you have finished building your Amazon Store, you can submit it by clicking the “Submit for publishing” button. Your Amazon Store will be submitted for moderation. Keep in mind, you can’t make changes to your draft while it is being moderated.

The moderation process can take several days.

Before you publish your Amazon Store, you should check for the following:

• Spelling or punctuation errors.
• All changes are included in the draft version.
• Use the mobile preview to make sure that your Amazon Store is optimized for the mobile experience.
• Check your images and videos to make sure that any text in them can be easily viewed (including on mobile).

 

How Much Does it Cost to Start an Amazon Store?

 

If you’re already selling and registered on Amazon, then you can open your own store at no additional cost.

 

An Overview of Amazon Store Insights (and How to Use It)

Up until recently, it’s been difficult to measure the impact of creative – specifically for Amazon Stores.

Now, brands have access to daily and aggregate views of their store’s performance through a new program – Amazon Store Insights.

“The new Amazon Store Insights feature gives us insight around the effectiveness of the Store and allows us to understand how an audience interacts with the pages that we create,” AJ Swamy, Creative Strategy Manager at Tinuiti said.

“The Store insights also allow us to tag external traffic so we can finally get more information around the effectiveness of external advertising campaigns that we route to our Stores. With Amazon Store Insights, we can see how many customers convert organically from the store, which is groundbreaking.”

 

Metrics Available via Amazon Store Insights

Amazon Stores Insights provides metrics by traffic source and by page including:

• Daily visitors: Total unique users or devices that viewed one or more pages on your store in a single day.
• Views: Number of page views during this time period. Includes repeat views.
• Sales: Estimated total sales generated by store visitors within 14 days of their last visit. Units and sales data are only available as of December 25, 2017.
• Units sold: Estimated total units purchased by store visitors within 14 days of their last visit.
• Views/Visitor: Average number of unique pages viewed by a daily visitor to your store

Pro-tip: You can access analytics from the store builder, or from the Stores main page.

In January 2019, Amazon added six additional metrics including:

• Sales/Visitor
• Sales/Visit
• Orders
• Orders/Visit
• Units/Order (A measure of order size)
• Sales/Order (A measure of order value)

According to Amazon, the latest performance metrics allow Store owners to make more informed optimization decisions depending on their goals.

For example, knowing that “Page 1” receives more visits than “Page 2” is not nearly as useful as knowing that “Page 1” receives more visits, but “Page 2” provides higher Units/Order or Sales/Visit. For a Store owner, this would encourage driving more traffic to high-performing pages or making improvements to low-performing pages that receive a lot of traffic.

More information about custom source tags – Custom source tags were originally limited to reporting of the top 30 source tags with some threshold of visits. Now Amazon can show the top 100 source tags and will allow users to export all source tags that meet the new relaxed data threshold.

Custom source tags for subpages – Creating subpage tags was a manual and error-prone process that frustrated our customers. With this release, Amazon’s made it very easy to create copy-and-paste source tag links for any page on the Store. The store owner simply selects the page they want to use as a destination, create a tag name, and generate a link.

Separation of “Sources” from “Your tags” – Customers who use custom tags do so in order to easily categorize traffic. Providing a dedicated location to find these tags facilitates this behavior.

Scalable UI Overhaul- Amazon updated their UI in the following ways:

• Tabbed cards: New tabbed card designs allow the user to see an overview of key metrics, but switch between metrics for more detail.
• Metric dropdowns: Dropdowns within cards allow a user to choose which metric to use for analyzing top pages, top sources, and top tags.
• Info tooltips: Info tooltips are now placed next to each individual metric and source type

New help content – Amazon has also added new help topics for their Store owners, including tips for improving performance, and for optimizing Sponsored Brands ads for Stores.

Traffic Sources Available for Amazon Store Insights

There are 4 traffic sources that Amazon measures including:

• Amazon Sponsored Brands: Traffic from Sponsored Brands ads on Amazon.
• Amazon organic traffic: Traffic from within Amazon, including from search results or brand detail page links.
• Tagged sources: Traffic being tracked with a custom source tag. You can create source tags for different traffic channels to get granular traffic tracking by source. Tagged sources data is only broken down to individual tags when it meets Amazon’s data count threshold within your selected time range. You can learn more about Tagged Sources here.
• Other: All other traffic sources not categorized.

 

FAQs About Amazon Store Insights

Amazon Store Insights is fairly new (not to mention a bit confusing, especially at first). Luckily, Amazon has answered a variety of common questions and concerns about the new platform:

Q1. Why is some data in the analytics dashboard unavailable? 

According to Amazon, as they “add information on your store performance over time, there could be instances where data is not available.”

Here’s why:

• Units and sales data are only available as of December 25, 2017.
• Tagged sources data is broken down to individual tags when they meet Amazon’s data threshold. Amazon only provides a breakdown of the top 30 tags.

 

Q2. How are sales and units sold calculated?

Amazon calculates the total sales or units sold based on Marketplace data. They take into account sales generated by store visitors within 14 days of their last visit to your store.

As of today, there are 2 types of attributed sales Amazon uses:

• • Direct sales or units: Total sales or units purchased of products available on a store page, where the store page was viewed by the purchasing customer.
  • Halo sales or units: Total sales or units purchased of products available on Amazon from your brand, where the product purchased was not available on the store page viewed by your customer.

 

Q3. How are sales and units sold attributed?

Amazon uses a last discovery methodology to attribute sales and units sold to pages and to sources.

• Sources: Amazon attributes the sale to the last source of the customer visit, prior to their purchase.
• Pages: Amazon attributes all direct sales to the page viewed that contained the purchased product. They attribute halo sales to the last page viewed in the customer visit prior to their purchase.

 

Pro-tip: It’s important to note that Amazon display sales data in Stores insights based on the date of the visit, not the date of the sale itself.

 

Q4. If I use Amazon ads to drive traffic to Stores, will I see my Stores performance data in Campaign Management?

Any data that is a specific store metric, such as views and daily visitors to your store, will only be available in Stores insights.

Q5. I am using Amazon ads to drive traffic to Stores. My campaign reporting shows different performance for my ads than what is reported in Stores insights. Why?

Stores insights shows the impact a traffic source has on your store page views and attributes sales based on those views. Amazon ad campaign reporting shows you the impact of the campaign itself on the audience that was exposed to it, whether or not the audience reached your store.

Both sets of reporting provide different insights on how your campaign is performing, and as a result, the reported performance may not match between them.

For example, within a single Amazon Headline Search ad, a customer can click on a product image and go to its detail page, or click on your brand logo and go to your Store.

The campaign reporting will give you a view of the performance of the ad, regardless of where the customer clicked. Stores insights will show you the performance of the campaign looking only at customers who reached your store.

 

Amazon Stores: The Bottom Line

If you haven’t thought about investing in Amazon Stores, it’s time. But if you haven’t even started with Amazon A+ or EBC Content, take care of that first.

Now that there are ways to measure the results of Amazon Stores, it’s not just about brand equity or fluffy brand awareness metrics.

You can always reach out to us for help with setting up your Amazon Store.

 

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in June 2017 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.