With the global rise in ecommerce, online storefronts are more important than ever, and Amazon is arguably the biggest. As a leading online retailer with billions of visitors a month, starting an Amazon storefront is a major step for many brands who don’t want to rely only on their website alone to drive orders.
Read on for a detailed, step-by-step guide to create your Amazon storefront, plus some bonus tips and tricks to help you get it off the ground.
Amazon storefronts are a way for brands to catalog — and promote — all of their products in one place. Many brands have their own websites that do this as well, but hosting a storefront on an already respected (and heavily trafficked) website like Amazon is a way to make your products more accessible.
With over 200 million Amazon Prime subscribers alone, creating an Amazon storefront for your brand is a great way to piggyback off of Amazon's website visitors and attract new customers.
Below, we'll discuss how to set yours up and how to make an impression with your storefront.
What you’ll need before beginning:
First, you’ll need to sign up for the Amazon Brand Registry. This ensures that your intellectual property is protected on their website and gives you access to the tools you’ll need to stop any bad actor accounts in their tracks.
To get started, head to the Brand Registry page and click “Enroll Now.” Select the country you wish to sell in, and sign in to your account through Seller Central.
You’ll be asked to fill out a brief form about your brand, and will then be directed to the Brand Registry page. Click “Manage,” then “Enroll a Brand”. Submit your enrollment for review, and voilà!
2. Add Products and Use A+ Content to Enhance Product ListingsOnce your Brand Registry enrollment is approved, you’ll be able to add products to your storefront and be granted access to tons of free tools that help you manage your Amazon presence, including a product listing enhancement feature called A+ Content. You can access these tools from your Seller Central account, by clicking “Advertising” and then “Enhanced Brand Content”.
Play around with the modules and templates. There should be prompts at the top of the page guiding you through this process – from detailed text descriptions to product Q&As and everything in between – so have fun with it and put your product’s best foot forward for potential customers!
Once you’re finished, submit the page to Amazon for approval. This can take around 7 business days and possibly longer during busy times, and then may take another 24 hours to appear after being approved, so be sure to plan ahead.
Keep in mind that Amazon has a list of content restrictions and guidelines surrounding A+ content, and has both paid and unpaid versions of A+ content which impact the types of content you’re able to add. For more details about these restrictions and limitations, take a look at their A+ content “About” page.
3. Build Your StorefrontIt’s finally time to build your Amazon storefront, a multi-page home base for your brand that features your entire catalog, your brand story and immersive media. Your storefront comes with its own link, so you can direct consumers to a specific product page or your whole catalog depending on your marketing needs.
To get started, log into Seller Central. Click on “Stores,” followed by “Manage Stores” and then “Create Store”. Next, choose a template for your storefront, then open Store Builder.
From there, you can use the Page Manager to add pages, rearrange or add content using the Tile Manager, and choose which products you want to display prominently. You can also opt to use dynamic widgets to automatically populate spaces based on keywords, bestsellers and more.
Once you’re done, use the Preview Window to make sure your storefront looks good, then submit it for approval! This can take a few days, and nobody likes rejection, so make sure you’re following Amazon’s Creative Guidelines.
4. Maintain It!The final step to building your Amazon storefront is to maintain it! As your business grows and you add new and exciting products, make sure they’re being represented on your home page.
You can also view your insights at any time by navigating to “Store Builder” and then clicking on “Insights.” From there, you can see page views, visitors, sales, and even identify where your traffic is coming from, so you can adjust your marketing strategy as needed. Happy selling!
Still having trouble? Check out this video walkthrough for more help.
Now that your Amazon storefront is ready to go, you’ll need to promote it! Amazon is a massive marketplace with lots of different options, so you’ll want to take advantage of any leg up you can get. Here are some tips and tricks to get you started:
With so many similar options for every search, offering incentivizes can give you a leg up over your competitors. One way you can do this is by utilizing Amazon coupon codes. You can create these coupons to be either a certain dollar amount off, or a certain percentage off. You can learn more about how Amazon coupons work for brands here.
Amazon also has a few other types of promotions you can run, including discount codes customers input at checkout. These are generally your best option to give to content creators or brand ambassadors, as they're easier to share and you can set them up to run for longer amounts of time. This strategy is a great way to increase your brand awareness on top of possible sales.
If you have a little extra ad money to spend, try paying for Amazon's Sponsored Product ads. These will help your product come up earlier in Amazon's search results, so you can improve visibility in an effort to drive sales. You can even control which keywords or products are targeted, or sit back and let Amazon match your ads automatically.
What’s extra helpful about Sponsored Product ads is that they’re cost-per-click, and you can set your own budget, so you’ll pay an amount that’s reasonable for you, and only after the payoff of a click!
Content creators can help drive traffic to your Amazon storefront by sharing content on their Instagram account, TikTok account and more, while including a link back to your storefront.
TikTok's video-based platform has skyrocketed to mainstream popularity in the past several years, with a staggering monthly active user base of 1 billion. Hashtags like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and #FoundItOnAmazon are incredibly popular, and contribute to the millions of dollars in sales TikTokkers continue to drive on Amazon.
Content creators are uniquely positioned to drive traffic back to Amazon in a few different ways. On Instagram, while they can’t add links to post captions, creators can direct their followers to a link in their bio, or even use a link sticker in their Instagram Stories. On TikTok, creators can verbally tell viewers to go check out your product on Amazon, or share a discount code that works on Amazon as a way to incentivize more traffic and purchases.
The caveat? Sourcing authentic creators to promote your products at scale can be tough — especially when you're juggling other marketing campaigns.
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