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Are you still forcing your customers to search and look up your products on crowded Amazon SERPs, where hundreds, if not thousands, of other listings compete against you for views and clicks daily?
Surely, you can do better as a brand.
In fact, Amazon has been encouraging sellers to focus more on brand positioning in the last couple of years with an increased focus on Amazon Posts, Amazon live videos, Amazon affiliate pages, Amazon A++ Content, and, of course, Amazon Stores.
No other feature on Amazon has been getting upgrades like Amazon Brand Stores. It’s almost like the ecom giant is hinting at a massive future for these website-like Amazon shopping pages. And it wants you to start leveraging them for your business to increase your sales, boost your rankings, and stand out from the competition.
In a hurry and can’t read the full blog? Set up your Amazon Store with these five quick steps:
Okay, but what exactly is an Amazon Brand Store, and how can it help you take your business to the next level?
An Amazon Brand Store is an online, customizable FBA shopfront that allows you to display all your brand’s product listings in one central area. It can consist of single or multiple pages, depending on your preferred design, and comes with a unique, dedicated URL. Think of it like a personalized mini website for your brand hosted on the Amazon marketplace.
Don’t confuse Amazon Brand Stores with Amazon Storefronts. The latter are a curated list of small businesses handpicked by Amazon. They are exclusively listed on the US marketplace and grouped by category, region, and seller profile. The idea is to empower and support local, small-scale sellers and provide Amazon users with an all-American shopping destination relevant to their interests.
You can find Amazon Storefronts under the Small and Medium Businesses section on the website.
Creating a store is free on Amazon. You don’t have to pay any maintenance fee either. You are good to go as long as you have a professional selling plan on Amazon. Of course, this doesn’t take into account any design work you may outsource for your store.
It’s worth noting Amazon offers a custom Store Builder to sellers to design their stores free of cost. The tool doesn’t require coding expertise or experience and comes preloaded with design templates. You can simply drag and drop the modules you like and set up your store in a few hours.
Opening a branded store on Amazon requires you to enroll your brand in the Amazon Brand Registry program. Without it, you can’t access the feature.
To apply for Amazon Brand Registry services, you must have the following:
No, you don’t need an LLC to create a brand store for your products on Amazon. However, there are multiple business benefits if you decide to go that route. You can read more about the benefits of setting up an LLC in our how to make your own LLC for Amazon guide.
Amazon offers brand store services in all its marketplaces. These include the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan, India, Mexico, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Turkey, Singapore, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands, Egypt, UAE, and the United Kingdom.
Earlier, we mentioned how an Amazon Store can help you with the positioning of your brand on the Amazon marketplace. But what exactly does this mean? And how can it benefit you as a seller?
Let’s try understanding the benefits of having a dedicated Amazon Store for your ecommerce business.
A brand store on Amazon is just like a personal business website. The entire navigation experience is focused on your brand, and you even get a custom URL. You can use the store pages to showcase your brand products, identity, and character to provide a curated shopping experience to visiting Amazon customers. It serves as a one-stop shop for anything and everything you want to promote or sell.
You can set yourself apart from other regular sellers in your niche with a brand store. Enjoy featured placements on the SERPs with the help of Sponsored Brand Ads and search engine optimization. Create customized promotional content with added bells and whistles. Bring a premium feel to your brand and funnel customers away from your competition. All this can be especially effective if you sell in a category where direct factories dominate and undercut you on price.
Competitor ads can be a real problem for sellers. They show up all across your Amazon listings, hurting your sales and bottom line. Interestingly, Amazon doesn’t enable competitor ads inside a brand store. Customers only see your products and listings while they are shopping.
Not many people know this, but Amazon favors brands that own a dedicated store on its marketplace, boosting their visibility and rank in the SERPs. Furthermore, unlike regular listings, where users exiting a product detail page can count against the seller, a brand store link can act as a buffer for high bounce rates. This is one of the most underrated benefits of having a brand store on Amazon.
Since the shopping experience inside your brand store is limited to your products only, it creates some tremendous cross-selling opportunities for your business. Shoppers can browse through your entire product portfolio without going back to the SERPs and add related or complimentary items to their shopping carts. This helps you increase your sales.
Did you know Amazon Stores come with a ‘Follow’ button? Customers that find your brand and products interesting can start following your store and get instant updates on new deals, product additions, content uploads, and more. Once you reach 1000 followers, you can even create email campaigns inside Amazon and build a loyal follower base for your brand.
How does a typical Amazon brand store look like?
The base layer of an Amazon Store is comprised of pages. Whenever customers click on your Amazon store link, they land on one of these pages, usually the homepage.
Image: VanFine brand store’s homepage
Depending on how many products you sell, you can have a single or multi-page store design. We recommend having a single-page Amazon brand store if you have less than ten products in your catalog. Remember, you can always make changes to your store design later. The pages are present as tabs in the top menu. This is a sticky-type menu, allowing shoppers to easily switch between different pages while they shop for products inside your store.
Image: Amazon Store pages listed as tabs in the top menu
Types of pages sellers use for their Amazon brand stores:
For what it’s worth, Amazon adds the Posts page by default to every brand store. It’s a good practice to update your Posts page regularly. More on this later.
There is also a search bar on the top right corner of your store to make navigation easier. It works just like any other navigation bar you find on a well-built business website.
Image: Amazon Store search bar in action
On the top of the store pages, you have modules, aka tiles. They give your pages the design you want. Everything from a product grid to an infographic to a customer testimonial video is added through them. They make up the second and final layer of your Amazon brand store.
Image: HighKey using the Shoppable Image module on their homepage
Now that you know the basics, let’s dive into the step-by-step process of how to build a brand store on Amazon. We’ll also throw in some insider tips for optimizing it for your best chances of success.
Before building a store, your brand needs to be registered with Amazon. To do this, you have to have a valid trademark. Check out this interview with Anita Mar of Trademark Angel to learn how you can easily trademark your Amazon product and get the ball rolling!
Once you have a trademark, it’s time to go through Amazon’s registration process. Simply log into your Seller Central account and navigate to brandregistry.amazon.com. Once there, select the “Enroll a new brand” button.
This begins the process of registering your brand. The next step is to fill out the Brand Eligibility form.
After filling out this form, you’ll be asked to provide Amazon with your trademark information.
Next up is submitting your brand characteristics. This involves providing basic information such as whether or not you manufacture your products and where they are manufactured.
That’s it! After you submit your application, the approval can take anywhere from 2 business days to 2 weeks. Once approved, it’s time to hop on Amazon Store Builder and start designing your brand store.
Think of an Amazon store as a way of telling your story. Crafting a brand means more than just selling a bunch of products with a logo on them; it means building trust between you and your customers. When someone believes you are the most knowledgeable, reliable name in your field, they’re more likely to buy from you (and come back for return purchases!).
Luckily, Amazon has made it easier than ever to make an attractive store that people want to browse, thanks to their Store Builder tool. To begin, go to your Seller Central homepage and select Stores > Manage Stores from the main navigation menu.
On the next page, click “Create Store” to launch the Store builder tool. Enter your store settings (brand name, logo, product grid style, etc.) and proceed to the next step.
After your basic store info is submitted, you can select from numerous page templates and start building the base layers of your brand store.
Amazon offers four main page templates option to sellers:
Each template offers unique layouts and comes equipped with preloaded modules (tiles), except for the Blank template that gives you the freedom to add any module you like to your page design. You typically start with the homepage (the Blank template is the best choice for this) and then move to other pages depending on your preferred design scheme.
Important: Try not to add more than 8 pages to your brand store. Amazon hides the extra pages under the “More” tab. This could prevent shoppers from finding those pages ever, and you could end up having redundant sections on your store.
Next, select the modules (tiles) you want to add to your store pages. Once again, you get multiple options to choose from. Visuals are key in any Amazon brand store design, so avoid the Text module as much as possible. Focus on the use of images, videos, and gifs instead. Take a look at this store, for example:
The product page above beautifully displays a specific product with professional lifestyle photography, video, and effective copy. Notice how the brand has smartly incorporated the use of text over the images rather than laying it out separately.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to be code-savvy to do all this design work. Just like page templates, you can simply use Amazon’s drop-and-drag functionality to add modules to your store. Let your creativity flow and design a store that captures the attention of your ideal buyer, taps into their emotions, and prompts them to take an action.
Finally, preview your store pages. Check the layouts on both desktop and mobile to ensure the design is on point. Review the meta descriptions for each page and add the important keywords to help with store indexability and visibility. Keep the navigation titles simple and clear. Correct any typos, grammatical errors, or informational inaccuracies. Go through the images to ensure they are properly cropped.
Once you’ve made all the checks, submit your brand store to Amazon for approval.
Amazon can take anywhere from 2 days to 2 weeks to approve your brand store. Keep in mind these only include working days and not weekends or public holidays. Rest assured; your store should go live as long as you haven’t violated Amazon’s content creation and acceptance policies.
Amazon auto generates your store link that best represents what you sell. You can find it on the Manage Stores page. However, you don’t have to settle for it. If you think your default store URL sounds spammy, you can open a support case with Amazon and ask them to change it.
You can add or link products to your Amazon store using the different product-type modules available in the Store Builder tool. All products are added via ASINs or keywords. Some commonly used product modules include:
Of course, Amazon expects sellers to comply with its in-house guidelines when designing their store to maintain a standard across the submissions. After all, the Amazon marketplace is no Wild Wild West, and brands need to follow some rules.
Here are some best practices for designing an Amazon Store:
Looking for some expert Amazon store design tips?
Let’s look at some of the existing Amazon Stores and see how they’ve implemented the above tips and best practices into their overall design strategy.
A single-page Amazon brand store with a limited number of products. They have everything on the homepage, including the About Us section. All the products are shown upfront, so customers don’t have to waste time looking for them. The navigation is simple, and there are lots of videos and lifestyle shots. In short, it’s a store design done well.
One of the biggest brands on Amazon. Their store is filled with visuals, showing real human faces, ideal customer personas, and settings in which the products are meant to be consumed. Picturesque!
A perfect example of how to use shoppable images above the fold without having a cluttered layout. The store design is neat, clean, visually appealing, and prompts users to take action.
Another pet brand, using a custom-designed banner to prompt shoppers to click on the Follow button. Clever application!
The Lost Walls Project store has used background videos on multiple pages to build an in-store vibe that drives interest and captures shoppers’ attention. You can find GIFs as background videos on the homepage, and UGC and canva-style background videos on the product pages.
By this point, you should have everything you need to build an Amazon Brand Store that wows customers and showers you with conversions. Take the extra time to get your store right; we promise it will pay off! FBA success takes long-term vision. Establishing yourself as the number one brand in your field takes years of patience and trial and error.
We here at ZonGuru are here to help make that journey a little easier. Our all-in-one Amazon selling tool suite is made by sellers, for sellers to help you find, validate, source, and optimize Amazon products that convert, all backed by our data-centric sales methods and a team of experienced FBA pros.
Don’t believe us? Sign up for a free, 7-day no commitment trial and check out the ZonGuru difference for yourself! Get started here, and happy selling!
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