What Brands Need to Understand about Amazon Stores

Delivering an on-brand customer experience on Amazon hasn’t always been easy. Product listings can leverage content to showcase personality and highlight a single product, but delivering a broader brand message can be more of a challenge. To help with this, Amazon has developed advertising tools that give brands more space to communicate their message. One of those tools is Amazon Stores. These on-Amazon landing pages are presented as a way to give brands more creative flexibility to reach shoppers — but it’s a bit more complicated than that. To be effective, Amazon Stores need to be seen as a marketing tool that relies on paid traffic. Otherwise, they don’t work. 

What is Amazon Stores?

Amazon Stores provides brands with a plug-and-play way to showcase a selection of products, along with their brand voice and image, on Amazon. Think of it as a DTC website experience within Amazon. Here’s an example from Netrush partner Sorel:  At first, this seems like a great way for brands to showcase specific catalogs to shoppers, but there’s a catch. It’s not easy for shoppers to find Amazon Stores organically. It needs to be viewed as an advertising tool, which means brands need to drive traffic to their store, usually through ads. 

Amazon Stores Need Marketing Dollars — Period

Stores are most useful when used in tandem with specific paid promotions — seasonal pushes, product launches, and the like. Here are examples of seasonal-themed Amazon Stores from Netrush partners Fjallraven and Leatherman:  These stores look great, but very few shoppers would find them without advertising campaigns to drive traffic. A key benefit of an Amazon Store is the Amazon URL, which allows a store to become a landing page for external campaigns. Any campaign that accepts URLs can point to a store. 

Why send paid traffic to Amazon, and not DTC?

When advertising on the Amazon marketplace, sending paid traffic to an Amazon Store is an easy decision. Shoppers are already on Amazon, and a branded storefront is a great way to reach higher-funnel shoppers on the marketplace. Plus, Amazon’s policies simply don’t allow advertisers to send ad traffic away from the marketplace.But what about using external ad platforms to send traffic to Amazon? Pinterest, Instagram, Google search ads — these are just a few advertising tools brands can use to drive traffic to their Amazon Store pages. That’s a harder sell. Most brands want to drive traffic to their DTC site.DTC may have better margins, but there’s still good reason to add an Amazon Store into the mix. Traffic volume is a ranking factor for A9, Amazon’s algorithm. The more traffic a brand has on Amazon, the better their products perform on the marketplace’s search engine.Brands don’t need to spend their entire budget driving traffic to Amazon, but carving out a portion to promote an Amazon Store isn’t a bad idea. DTC and Amazon are both important tools for brands and should work together under the same roof. 

Key Takeaways

• Amazon Stores provide brands with a great way to showcase products with more creativity, but it’s predominantly an advertising tool and needs marketing budget behind it to drive traffic.

• One of the most strategic advantages of an Amazon store is the Amazon URL. Using this URL, brands can drive traffic from many different sources and use their store strategically.

• Using a portion of external advertising to drive traffic to an Amazon Store may sound like a hard sell, but by doing so, brands can increase their organic performance on the marketplace.