Amazon is wooing brands with a new offering called Amazon Stores that replaces brand “pages,” which launched 5 years ago. The new Store offering provides brands a more powerful way to showcase their products – they can customize the look of their store and can curate it with a dynamic or handpicked assortment of products.
Alon Sheafer, Chief Innovation Officer and cofounder of Kenshoo, told EcommerceBytes that having a store on Amazon is a benefit for brands as it gives them more control of the design, content, and experience within Amazon. “A user landing on a store page is more likely to explore and see more products and offerings from the brand. Brands can monitor the performance and get store metrics from Amazon.”
Sheafer said it’s too early to estimate the impact of the new offering on non-brand sellers, but said it could actually be beneficial. “This offering may drive more traffic within Amazon and to Amazon from external sources. When more traffic will come to the site, there will be lift in sales.”
The program is open to brands who sell through Vendor Central (you’ll see their products “Ships from and sold by Amazon.com”) using Amazon Marketing Services (AMS).
The program is also open to sellers who are brand owners – they can access Amazon Stores via Seller Central.
Amazon encourages brands to market their Amazon Stores on social networking sites and, of course, by advertising on Amazon.
Amazon isn’t shy about the fact it’s competing with brick-and-mortar retail stores – it is pitching the new offering as a way to bring the “in-store experience” online and calls it an “immersive virtual shopping experience.” Brands can publish multimedia content on their Amazon Store pages, including videos.
For an example of a brand store, here’s a link to celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Amazon Store. Let us know what you think by posting a comment below.
Curious to see if this will help or harm non-branded sellers,… more traffic to Amazon product pages, but brand-gating is a challenge for small sellers.