For over ten years, IRON has been providing Amazon Storefront Design services to some of the nation’s best-loved brands.
What is an Amazon Storefront?
Amazon Storefronts are free, multi-page microsites that live on the Amazon platform. With online shopping growing in importance by the day, they have become essential tools for promoting brand awareness and driving sales through a carefully curated portfolio of products.
Easy to Set Up
Storefronts themselves are relatively easy to set up. You can use drag-and-drop technology or predesigned templates to create customized, multi-page stores. You don’t need to write a single line of code. You don’t even need to be a master Photoshop wizard to get going.
Store Builder
Amazon’s self-serve platform lets businesses design customized shopping experiences. Easy-to-use templates help to create multi-page stores, which can be used to curate and highlight key product categories, brand moments, and new product launches.
Easy To Update
With free setup and no maintenance fees, you can update content on your schedule. New releases and seasonal sales can be expertly massaged and managed, enabling you to nimbly market to the largest captive consumer base on the internet.
Custom URL
To make matters easier each Storefront comes with its own Amazon.com web address. So, once set up, you can drive shoppers to your Store with ads on Amazon and a variety of marketing vehicles outside of the platform – using your unique Amazon URL.
Store Insights
You can also take advantage of baked-in analytics data. Just access your Storefront’s powerful Amazon Stores Insights tool. This free-to-use analytics platform lets you analyze your sales and traffic sources and optimize your Store and Amazon ad campaigns over time.
Simple But Potent
In short, these simple but potent tools, if used in the right way – ideally by a team with specific Amazon Storefront Design expertise – can dramatically improve your performance on the most important e-commerce platform around.
Why is an Amazon Storefront so important?
In the last ten years, Amazon has become an essential digital sales channel for most US-based brands. Since more consumers begin their product search at Amazon (rather than Google), Amazon Stores may be a brand’s most valuable home on the internet.
Despite the apparent advantages that your own eCommerce website gives you, Amazon provides trust, convenience, and access to a vast new customer base that you can activate through a variety of sophisticated, self-serve marketing tools.
Countless brands have pivoted to maximize the potential of Amazon to drive exponential growth in their digital businesses. For those brands, Stores are an essential piece of digital real estate. They drive sales. Build their brand story. And test and learn a variety of sales techniques and messages. If you are not effectively using Stores, you can bet your competitors are.
So, if Amazon isn’t already your number 1 digital channel marketing partner, you might want to rethink your strategy.
New Customers
Amazon also represents a vast, untapped source of potential customers – people who would otherwise never visit your DTC website. And since 74% of Amazon customers use the website to discover new products or brands, the potential to reach new customers is enormous.
Easy Targeting
These audiences can be effectively and efficiently targeted through a host of advertising vehicles and can be just a click or two away from your own rich multimedia experience.
Test and Learn
With its free-to-play model, Amazon Stores are a cost-effective tool to test and learn against a variety of messaging and design criteria. And as you optimize the online Store over time, that data only grows in significance.
Who Can Create an Amazon Storefront?
Amazon Storefronts are available for anyone enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry, as well as vendors and agencies.
But even though they are free to create, for a store to be effective, you will want to use Amazon Storefront Best Practices and effectively drive traffic to it. That’s typically done using Amazon’s vast array of self-service ad solutions designed for marketers of every level of expertise and specialist Amazon advertising agencies (such as IRON Creative).
A Multi-channel Approach
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How to design an Amazon Store
Ideally, you should approach the design of your Amazon Store like you would the design of your own DTC website – not to mention your other sales channels. At a minimum, it should feature the same brand and product photography and the same macro product pages. Retailers have long since acknowledged that customers are channel-agnostic. According to one Ecommerce Association, they might use as many as 12 channels and devices in their shopping journey. The only logical conclusion is to let a multi-channel approach inform the design of your Amazon Store. But as the customer dives deeper into the Amazon sales funnel, custom product page photography and graphics are a highly effective way to give that specific customer just what they need. Since they cannot physically touch and feel your product, you must go above and beyond to show the customers your product’s unique features.
Further Reading -
Optimizing your Amazon Store
Amazon Stores are seasonal selling tools and should act as vibrant, living channels. They need to be kept current for new and returning customers. Products change, customer expectations evolve, and the seasons come and go. According to Amazon, “Stores updated within the past 90 days have 21% more repeat visitors and 35% higher attributed sales per visitor”.
Further Reading
What do Amazon Stores Look Like?
The best Amazon Stores can rival and sometimes eclipse their parent direct-to-consumer (DTC) websites. And that should come as no surprise. An expertly branded Store provides the single biggest opportunity for a brand to tell its story to an existing and new customer base.
These multi-page brand showcases can include a variety of rich media and custom selling features. This potent mix of tools is designed to increase brand awareness, improve brand recognition and optimize product sales on this, the most sales-focused of websites.
Anatomy of a Storefront
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Amazon Storefront Modules and Content Types
Every Store page has a built-in header section (that you should customize) and needs, at a minimum, at least one content tile. Each tile can showcase text, lifestyle images, videos, or products. Your design team should expertly combine these tiles to create the right brand and product story for each Store page. And since each page can have up to 20 sections in total, the creative options for product and brand owners are limitless.
Store pages can feature a combination of the following tiles:
• Background video (maximum of 4)
• Video
• Product
• Product grid (maximum of 1)
• Recommended products (maximum of 1)
• Gallery (maximum of 1)
• Featured deals (maximum of 1)
• Text
• Image
• Image with text
• Shoppable image
• Bestsellers -
Split sections
For added variety, you can use split sections, which contain multiple tiles that can be rearranged into a variety of layouts. Single-row split sections are also variable in height adding further customization to the templates.
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Tile Sizes
There are two types of tiles within the Stores ecosystem: basic tiles and variable-height tiles. Basic tiles are defined by a pre-determined aspect ratio. There are four basic tile sizes: full-width, large, medium, and small. Variable-height tiles allow the aspect ratio of the tile to be determined by the height of the content. Both image and text tiles support variable height.
How Much Does it Cost to Design an Amazon Storefront?
The truth is, the cost of the Amazon Store design should be a function of its value to your business. If you are a new brand and are unsure if this particular Amazon strategy makes sense to you, you could forge ahead and do it yourself.
Value Rather Than Cost
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Amazon Design Agency
On the other hand, if you have a large (or underperforming) Amazon business, employing a team of specialists could yield dramatic increases in traffic and attributed sales. In fact, in the past year alone, we’ve been able to increase Amazon Store sales for our clients between 2.5x and 7x year-over-year. Ask yourself, what would that be worth to you? But it’s best not to think of this as a stand-alone digital experience. These days it’s a crucial touchpoint in the increasingly complex customer journey.
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Digital Versus Physical
Think what you’d pay to establish a new brick-and-mortar retail store. For a start, you’d pay thousands of dollars in rent. You’d have hiring and employee training costs. You’d need to purchase all your inventory upfront. And then pay to print seasonal signage, POS materials, and new window displays. The costs and risks start to stack up.
Given their value, you must ask yourself if a specialist Amazon Storefront agency could help you boost your brand presence and increase sales.
Do You Need a Specialist Agency?
Brand sales at Amazon have snowballed in the last few years as the online market has boomed. And Amazon itself has risen to meet the demand, creating ever-more complex and effective tools for sellers.
A Dedicated Amazon Storefront Agency
An in-house team with the proper training can be an effective way to develop your Amazon store. But the advantage of using a dedicated Amazon storefront design agency is that they will have created multiple brand stores, spanning a variety of categories, over multiple years.
Using this knowledge and constantly gaining a deeper understanding of the platform and available modules can dramatically help them improve your brand’s performance.
Similarly, they’ll know about changes in process, service conditions, and the latest design features and back-end quirks.
Overall, agencies with deep Amazon experience will leverage that expertise to bring growth and higher performance to your branded Amazon store.
Full-stack Amazon Services
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Our Amazon Storefront Services
IRON Creative has been designing Amazon Stores for over ten years. We developed the first-ever amazon Store for Levi's. And we've been building robust and integrated Stores ever since for some of the biggest names in retail.
• Information architecture planning, organization, and management
• Custom design of Amazon Storefront page templates
• Amazon Storefront page build, publishing, and maintenance
• Graphic design for each module – including images, banners, and infographics
• Product and brand photography
• 360º Spin product photography
• Product and brand video creation
• Image processing and retouching
• Product, brand, and advertising copy
• Quality Assurance (QA)
• User Testing -
From Sales to Brand Building
We help brands turbocharge their Amazon sales channel and develop it into a powerful brand-building platform. Combining analytics with world-class creative, we amplify brands at Amazon and their other channel marketing platforms.
Our Amazon Storefront design services can radically improve your digital presence. Our designers are experts at using the ever-evolving Amazon Storefront features such as rich-media content, custom design templates, and hotspot modules to easily differentiate your Store from your Amazon marketplace competitors. -
Amazon Storefront Design Experts
Our Amazon Storefront design experts understand the particular design constraints of the platform. They are adept at bringing your specific brand to life within what can be, in the wrong hands, a limiting and frustrating framework.
Not only will your brand stand out from your competitors, but it will also act as an extension and bespoke deployment of your parent brand. Bringing all of the brand equity your customers crave but tailoring the experience to their particular sales-focused shopping needs.
Our ten+ years of Amazon experience helped us build some of the most respected and highest-performing Stores on the platform. We’re passionate brand evangelists as well as expert Amazon marketers.
The Takeaway
By retaining an expert team of designers and strategists, an Amazon brand Store can be one of the most cost-effective sales and brand-building tools in your arsenal. And while Amazon has set it up so you can go it alone, in our experience, investing in professional help can pay rich dividends.
IRON Creative consistently delivers innovation, strategic leadership, and peerless execution at an impressive scale.
Let's Talk
Thousands of brands, both large and small, have woken up to the potential of Amazon to drive unparalleled growth in their businesses. Whether you’re new to the platform or looking to take your Amazon game to the next level, we’re confident we can help.
Drop us a line.
Contact us120 2nd St. Floor 3,
San Francisco, CA 94105