As an ecommerce retailer, having an appealing virtual store is essential.
Without a brick-and-mortar space to decorate, you must create an engaging online store, especially in a competitive marketplace like Amazon. Even the tiniest details can make a huge difference.
Setting up an Amazon Store is quick and easy. Below are best practices to help you stand out from the crowd.
What is an Amazon Store?
All Amazon sellers, vendors, and agencies enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry program are eligible to create their own Amazon Store. It’s a free DIY platform that enables brand owners to create and design multi-page stores to showcase their products and brand story.
The idea behind Amazon Stores is to drive shopper engagement. Amazon provides all the tools to create a unique store that allows you to feature custom collections of products you’d like to promote.
With the ability to create up to three levels of multiple pages, you have plenty of space to showcase your brand. Combining your products in one place is no different than stocking the shelves of a physical location. (You’ll never have to worry about cleaning up on aisle four!)
An Amazon Store provides benefits for both you and your customers, including:
- Promoting all your products in a single place.
- Introducing your brand to new customers.
- Capitalizing on both internal and external traffic.
- Driving sales by boosting organic rankings on Amazon SERPs.
- Offering an enhanced mobile experience.
Your Amazon Store also gives you a unique URL, allowing you to attract customers using ads and other marketing activities anywhere. You aren’t just limited to Amazon.
The Insights page provides you with all the metrics you need to determine traffic sources and sales, helping you see what is working and where you could improve.
7 steps for setting up your Amazon Store
No special skills or programming knowledge is needed to set up an Amazon Store.
You can easily create a customized, professional-looking virtual store with an array of pre-designed templates and drag-and-drop tiles.
Simply upload existing files and arrange them however you’d like. Best of all, you don’t need to write a single line of code.
Follow these seven steps to set up your own Amazon Store.
Step 1: Create a professional seller account
A professional seller account is worth the investment if your monthly sales volume exceeds more than 40 units per month.
You’ll have access to a host of inventory tools not available on individual accounts, and creating one is the first step in setting up your Amazon Store.
After providing basic information, Amazon will verify your details and eligibility.
Step 2: Register with Amazon Brand Registry
You must register your brand through the Amazon Brand Registry (ABR) to gain full control of your product pages.
Signing up for an ABR also gives you access to various tools, such as Brand Analytics and enhanced marketing and advertising services. It also protects your brand from counterfeit sellers.
Step 3: Design your store’s homepage
Select a template for your store by choosing one of four themes best suited to your business needs.
You can focus on sharing your brand story, highlighting a specific product, displaying a grid view of related products, or building from scratch. Remember, no coding is required!
Step 4: Create your store pages
Once you’ve set up your homepage, you’ll want to build additional pages to focus on products, categories, promotions, discounts, and more.
Design these pages much as you would if you had your ecommerce website by focusing on easy navigation. You want to make the shopping experience easy for your customers.
Step 5: Add content tiles to your pages
After setting up an easily-navigable page hierarchy, add content tiles to each page.
These consist of content your customers will interact with, including titles, images, galleries, videos, or product grids.
Step 6: Upload your products
When your design layout is complete, it’s time to upload your inventory.
You can add one product at a time or every single SKU at once as long as you have assigned each product an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) or UPS code.
Step 7: Submit your store for review and publish
Review your created pages for proper grammar and spelling. Make sure branding and images are consistent, and double-check your navigation.
Once satisfied with everything, submit your pages to Amazon for review. When they’re approved, you can go ahead and publish them.
Congratulations! Now you’re live and ready to start selling.
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3 tips for maximizing your Amazon Store
Now that you’ve created your Amazon Store, you’ll want to get the most out of it. Keep in mind that optimizing your store is an ongoing process.
Just as you wouldn’t keep a physical display window the same all year long, nobody wants to see Santa Claus in June!
Constantly refresh your Amazon Store to take advantage of new trends, promotions, product launches and seasonality.
Updating content frequently is another crucial way to achieve success. Do this when unveiling new products, running promotions or rebranding.
Here are three ways to take advantage of the resources at your disposal.
Use the Brand Analytics tool
The Brand Analytics tool is a great way to measure your sales performance. While third-party plug-ins are available, they are costly and provide estimates in place of hard data.
Amazon’s Brand Analytics tool displays top-performing keywords and search terms, allowing you to optimize your product pages and create targeted ads based on customer demographics.
Increase sales through Amazon ads
There’s no disputing the power of advertising as long as you are doing it strategically. Anybody can place an ad on Amazon, but to be genuinely effective, targeted Amazon ads are best.
These appear on Amazon’s results page, offering excellent visibility. That, in turn, leads to higher sales and revenue.
They also appear everywhere on Amazon – even on detailed product pages.
Adopt best practices when building your brand
This means:
- Focusing on consistent messaging.
- Creating engaging and rich content that spotlights your unique value proposition.
- Ensuring your Amazon Store offers easy and intuitive navigation.
Learn when – and how – to make adjustments
Sometimes, your Amazon Store might fail to meet your expectations despite your best efforts.
Issues can usually be resolved quickly, as long as you pay attention to signs that your store could benefit from freshening up. Look for indications such as:
Low daily traffic
If you don’t see a lot of traffic, chances are, people are having a hard time finding you.
Consider promoting your Amazon Store on social media and through paid advertising campaigns. Double-check to make sure your product ASINs are linking properly to your store.
Good traffic but poor sales
What if traffic numbers to your store are high, but people aren’t purchasing your product within 14 days of their last visit, and visibility isn’t an issue?
Your products may be pricey or dependent upon high consumer trust.
Consider building brand awareness through additional content or Sponsored Brands videos.
If the issue is high product turnover rates, try adding tiles that make it easy for customers to purchase products (e.g., a product grid or individual tiles with an “Add to Cart” button).
Good conversion rates on category pages with low traffic
If your pages are converting well, but traffic rates remain low, try targeting Sponsored Brands campaigns around those pages.
Your Insights dashboard can provide information on orders/visitor or units/visitor to help you figure out the correct source tags.
Good traffic on category pages with low sales
When pages have good visibility but don’t have the sales expected from visitor traffic, it might be that the pages only feature one product or provide more information on your brand than products for sale.
Try adding multiple products through a grid tile to increase your conversion rate.
No traffic or sales
Are there pages with no traffic or sales? You might be providing information customers don’t find helpful, or your products may be difficult to find.
Remedy this by making a specific page more visible on your homepage or setting up a Sponsored Brands campaign to drive traffic.
Optimizing your Amazon Store should be an ongoing process
Remember, your Amazon Store isn’t all that different from a traditional brick-and-mortar retail space. Through trial and error, you’ll learn what works and what doesn’t.
You can adjust your store’s inventory, layout, or design to appeal to a wider range of customers and boost your sales.
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