Amazon recently rolled out several new Stores features to help brand owners better engage shoppers with richer content experiences. Get the details here.By Natalie TaylorJune 22, 2020
Stay on top of the latest e-commerce and marketplace trends.
Amazon Stores were first introduced in 2017, granting sellers and brands the opportunity to create a unique brand destination on amazon.com that provides consumers with a curated shopping experience. For brand owners, making an Amazon Store is free and fully self-service.
Amazon Stores is not to be confused with Amazon Storefronts, which launched in 2018 as an option for small and medium-sized businesses to highlight a curated selection of products they are selling on the platform. Rather, with Amazon Stores, brands owners can choose from several design templates with different store layouts and customizable features that will most accurately illustrate their brand story and value proposition.
Brands can then decide which products to feature and can leverage optional multimedia content to inform shoppers’ purchase decisions. Lastly, they can utilize built-in social features such as social sharing buttons or integrate Sponsored Brands to promote brand awareness and drive high-quality traffic to their product listings.
One common complaint from Store owners was that it was difficult for shoppers to find their Stores, unless the brand owners actively drove them to their Store through Amazon paid ads or from external search queries. Some of these new features help address these concerns.
Since its inception, there have been continuous improvements made to Amazon Stores. Now, the Stores Insight dashboard allows owners to monitor daily visits, pages, views, page views per visitor, sales, and sale units attached to the Store. Initially, brands were limited to 30 source tags, but now they can view and export the top 100 source tags. Also, companies can add a 20-second video that will automatically play on repeat as soon as a visitor lands on the Store’s main page.
Over the last year, Amazon released several more Store features to help brand owners engage shoppers with rich content experiences, as well as updates to help improve the user experience for brands which we have summarized below.
1. Shoppable Images
Shoppable images allow you to display your products with appealing lifestyle images that feature your products in various settings or in collections with other complementary products from your portfolio. When you choose to make any of the products featured in the image to be “shoppable,” this enables customers to click on the featured products and view basic information, such as the product’s name, price, customer ratings, and Prime availability. Shoppers can also add the product to their shopping cart or easily navigate to the product detail page to access more information that will inform their purchase decision.
2. Images With Text
With this new capability, you have the option to add descriptive text to your images and customize its location, size, alignment, and color. This feature allows you to provide visual descriptions of your products’ benefits, uses, and differentiating factors from the competition. According to Amazon, this text can also help optimize your Store’s SEO by increasing traffic from third-party search engines. Therefore, be sure to incorporate your product’s top keywords when taking advantage of this new feature.
3. Enhanced Product Management
There are now several features that make it easier to manage the products displayed in your Store and also enable you to more quickly make updates to your Store when needed. Rather than uploading products individually, you can now upload products in bulk to your product grids and featured-deals tiles. If any products are out of stock, you can choose to have them automatically hidden.
In addition, you can now publish Stores updates at scheduled dates and times to ensure that new releases, seasonal changes, and other time-sensitive updates will be published when you want them to go live, according to your schedule.
4. New Ways for Customers to Discover Stores
Amazon shoppers can now discover your Store by clicking on your brand logo, which has been added to the bottom of the landing page of your Sponsored Brands ads. Therefore, it is essential that you upload your brand logo in your Store builder and be sure to keep it updated.
Amazon is also experimenting with additional ways that shoppers can discover your brand Store. This includes a beta test in which Stores appear with a customer’s search results. Your Store, including brand name and image, would appear within a carousel of other brand Stores, with direct links to each, according to Digiday.
New ways for customers to discover Amazon Stores is critical because any of the traditional methods that a customer would use to search for a specific brand would likely bring up competing brands as well. Rather than promote individual sellers, Amazon tends to promote product catalogs and bestsellers within that category. However, these new features are designed to give customers more opportunities to find your Amazon store and help build upon your brand’s awareness within the marketplace.
5. More Stores Performance Insights
In 2018, Amazon released the Stores Insights dashboard to help Store owners monitor their Store’s effectiveness and performance metrics. Within the dashboard, these stakeholders can gain visibility into the daily visits, page views, page views per visitor, sales, and sales units attached to their Store.
Store owners can also see which traffic sources drive the most Store page views and sales, such as organic Amazon traffic, Sponsored Brands, or off-Amazon traffic such as from social media platforms. They can create a source tag for their unique Store URL to then use to measure traffic from specific external sources.
In an effort to optimize the user experience for brands interested in tracking the performance of their Store, they have expanded the metrics set to include data points such as sales per visit, orders, orders per visit, units per order, and sales per order, all within the dashboard.
6. Custom Source Tag Optimizations
The Insights dashboard has allowed brands to capitalize on custom source tags to figure out how shoppers get to their Store, allowing them to keep a pulse on their various traffic sources. Originally, brands were limited to 30 source tags and can now see the top 100 source tags, and are able to export all of them.
Amazon has also given brands the ability to create copy-and-paste source tag links for pages in their Store outside of the homepage. Brands can select the page they want to use as the destination and can then generate a tag name and unique link.
About the Author
Natalie Taylor is the content manager at Feedvisor, where she oversees and executes on the company's content marketing strategy. Prior to her work at Feedvisor, she wrote for a B2B supermarket magazine, focusing on merchandising and marketing trends in the grocery industry.
7. Integrating Background Videos
Brands can now add a two to 20-second video that will automatically play and repeat on loop when your Amazon Store page loads for the customer to see. Brands can pick videos in full-width, large, or medium tiles, allowing for an additional way to demonstrate their brand’s features and benefits.
Final Thoughts
Brand Stores can be immensely beneficial for driving brand awareness, cross-selling, launching a new product, and demand generation at scale. To maximize Store exposure, you can link your store in the brand byline of your product listings, include your unique store URL in off-Amazon marketing activations, and share your Store on social media networks. Brands can use the dedicated space to maintain, develop, and illustrate their brand identity by showcasing products and creative that support their overall brand values and image.
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