The most coveted product by consumers across the globe, especially during the holiday season, isn’t a product at all — it’s a service.
While most brands have their own D2C site, Amazon provides a level of convenience rarely found elsewhere in eCommerce, making it a top destination for holiday shoppers. According to a survey conducted by Kantar Quickfire, 4 in 5 shoppers surveyed consider Amazon their primary shopping destination. But with a hyper-competitive search page, brands may find it hard to showcase all of their products to the consumer.
Luckily, Amazon allows brands to place their websites — which might otherwise fall into relative obscurity — right in front of the customer. With the help of a few native tools and successful holiday advertising trends, an Amazon Brand Store can capture the enormous, convenience-seeking audience that is looking to find gifts this holiday season online.
Below we will provide tips to make updating an Amazon Brand Store seamless for this upcoming holiday season, allowing brands to make last-minute adjustments just as sales begin to pick up.
Tip #1: Create a holiday version of your store rather than updating your existing store
Instead of reconstructing a brand store from the ground up, Amazon allows sellers and vendors to set up alternate versions.
This tool enables advertisers to construct and set live a relevant holiday brand store version before the holiday season begins, to give time for advertisements to draw customers over and set the roots for retargeting later. Simply copy your existing brand store and rename it to something easily identifiable.
Once a brand store version for the holiday season has been created and optimized, brand owners can then schedule when the store goes live, and when the evergreen version returns. We recommend setting a holiday-specific brand store for launch in October to capitalize on early shoppers, Black Friday/ Cyber Monday deal seekers, and last-minute rush purchasers.
As for a holiday brand store’s end date, we would recommend setting a pause time in mid-January, switching the holiday version back to evergreen in the first week of the new year. Because brand store metrics disappear after a store version is taken down, you’ll want to gather the data for the next Q4 before removing anything.
Tip #2: Holiday-specific brand stores should feature relevant holiday keywords within both text and image copy
Brands should be able to tell their story and show off their products in the context of the holiday season.
Update images to include holiday-specific keywords either through a custom image with embedded text or through an image with text, simply editing the copy directly in Amazon’s store builder. (Example below!)
Tip #3: Display top-selling SKUs at the forefront of the brand store
Customers will be expecting to see the best deals and products front and center, so displaying primary focus SKUs should be a top priority. Amazon allows for modular “Featured Deal” tiles to display current ongoing promotions and hide out-of-stock products.
Utilizing these will keep your pages fresh and up-to-date for customers seeking products available for immediate purchase.
On that note, customers seeking to purchase a product may not know exactly what it is they want yet. For customers who aren’t set on a specific product, or who haven’t made their decision yet on exactly which product to buy, brand stores should be organized in such a way that they facilitate the process and make a buying decision easy for the consumer.
Tip #4: Put user experience at the forefront of your brand store structure
It’s not enough to have a catalog of all your products in one centralized location; the products should be organized, defined, and enticing to drive a purchase. Convenience is more than just ease of access — it’s also ease of mind.
Ensure you understand how your customers are discovering products in your category. Use keyword data to understand what phrases and attributes the consumer is searching for and allow that to define your store structure. For example, are consumers searching by age? By gender? By size? By specific product type? These should all be questions you ask when designing a brand store on Amazon.
Tip #5: Drive as much traffic to your Holiday Brand Store as possible
During your holiday Brand Store’s runtime, brand owners should seek to drive as much outside traffic to Amazon as possible, further providing convenience to the customer. Through brand store insights, brand owners can create, distribute, and monitor source tags. Source tags are links created within a brand store that can be used in paid and organic advertisements to bring customers to specific brand store pages, eliminating the need for them to browse through a catalog of irrelevant products and get right to purchasing.
These links can be labeled and tracked through brand store insights, allowing for real-time monitoring of omnichannel campaign efficiency and conversion rates. Furthermore, brand store insights track add-to-cart and order numbers, for a hyper-accurate measurement of sales.
And that’s that! Following these guidelines, a brand can and will capitalize on Amazon’s massive audience to increase conversions, sales, and NTB (new to brand) customer acquisition during this hypercompetitive Q4.
For more information and help on creating Amazon Brand Stores reach out to our team of experts at [email protected].
– Amir Madmoune, Amazon Associate