Setting up an Amazon storefront is one of the best ways to promote your brand and products on Amazon. It’s available to all brand registry enrolled sellers, which you should be if you have a registered trademark, and it lets you showcase your products and tell your brand story.
Let’s just look at a few key advantages. First of all, you have a front page where you can send social media and newsletter contacts; you don’t have to send them straight to an individual product. Secondly, you can show different products together, which is great news if you have a collection of matching items such as lime green kitchenware or alpaca wool clothing, or different specialized cleaning products (for leather, silver, copper, stains…).
And then, you have no competitors taking up real estate. That’s something that can happen on your product page, but it can’t happen on your storefront. You have 100 percent of the space and of your customers’ minds. Plus, you can tell your brand story, and the entire space feels like your own branded e-commerce store – your logo, your color scheme, and your ‘look and feel’ and unique vibe.
You can also put ‘Visit the Wedoitall store” under all your product titles. So anyone browsing one of your products and thinking, “Hm, I wonder what else they do?” can easily click over to see.
Plus setting up your storefront is actually quite easy to do. Amazon provides a number of templates; all you need is to provide the content and drag-and-drop it into the right boxes.
The process is simple. You’ll see ‘Stores’ in Seller Central’, so click ‘Manage stores’ and then ‘Create store’, and you’re started already. You need to add your brand name, the way you want it displayed, and your logo, and then you get started right away on creating your home page.
Note that the meta description you’re asked to add is one of the key determinants of success, so craft it well. It’s essential to get search engines’ attention but it also gets read by real people, so it has to be well crafted in real language, not just a list of keywords.
Choose your layout; unless you’re building from scratch, which is harder to do, marquee is usually the right format for a home page. (When you come to create subsidiary pages, the product highlight template works well for individual products, while the product grid can be good to show your range quickly or for instance to highlight a new collection, a color way or a particular range of product.) After this, you just drag and drop to fill the boxes.
Think carefully about your “hero image” at the top of the page. It needs to be inspiring, showing your products in the real world or showing the brand value. For instance, if you provide vitamin supplements, you might show an athlete breasting the tape, or a woman doing yoga, depending on who is your core customer. This is the second really crucial thing to get right.
Once you have the main page ready, you can add pages that sit underneath it. You can build a hierarchy; for instance,Miaow Cat Toys, Miaow Scented Cat Toys, Miaow Scented Fish-Shaped Cat Toys. You’ll need to add each subcategory to the relevant product page. Or you can create special pages for new products, for different design themes, or for different use cases. Search for your products by ASIN and just drop them in.
By the way, research shows that additional pages and new content are crucial in getting shoppers to stick around, and to revisit your store, so a ‘new products’ page is a great one to add.
Finally, check everything. Check for broken links, typos, missing images, poor alignment, and contradictory information. And when you’re sure that it’s all good, submit to Amazon. Your store will be vetted within 72 hours and you’ll either see it go live, or get a list of errors to fix.
This isn’t the end. Amazon gives you heaps of metrics to see if your storefront is working, and which categories and pages are doing well. You can see what keywords customers are using and even what keywords your competitors are using. So keep checking to see if you can tweak it that little bit more.
And of course, don’t forget to promote your store, any way you can, whether that’s PPC advertising, social media, or through your email newsletter.
