The Amazon Brand Store, and What It Is Actually For

Every other surface on Amazon is shared. A product page carries competitors in the carousel below it, in the comparison table, and in the sponsored strip above the fold. Search results are a grid of other people's products with yours somewhere in it. The Brand Store is the exception: a multi page space where the whole screen belongs to one brand and nothing on it is selling anything else.

That is worth understanding before deciding how much effort it deserves, because the answer is not obvious. A Brand Store is not a shop in its own right. Nobody browses Amazon by brand the way they browse a high street, and a Store with no traffic pointed at it will sit there receiving a trickle. What it is is a destination worth having when something is already sending people somewhere.

Brand Registry. That is the whole of the eligibility rule and it is the same gate that unlocks A+ content, Sponsored Brands and the brand analytics reporting, which is why registry tends to be the thing that changes what a seller can do rather than any single feature. Registry needs a registered trademark, and the application is a documentation exercise rather than a form.

A reseller cannot build a Brand Store for somebody else's brand, and this catches people out: selling a brand's products, even a lot of them, is not the same as owning the brand on Amazon. What is and is not permitted when reselling is its own subject, and we have written about what reselling on Amazon actually allows.

Four routes, and their relative sizes are the reason most Stores underperform.

The byline on a product page, the small brand name above the title, is the one nobody plans for and it delivers steadily. Somebody reading a product page, deciding they like what they see and wanting to know what else the brand makes: that is the highest intent traffic a Store gets and it costs nothing.

Sponsored Brands advertising is the one that can be turned up. A Sponsored Brands placement can send its click to a Store page rather than to a product listing, which is the only way to buy traffic into a Store at scale. Whether that is a good idea depends on the product: a considered purchase with a range behind it benefits, a single impulse item usually does not, and the campaign types are worth understanding before choosing between them. We cover what each Amazon ad type earns its budget on separately.

Off Amazon traffic is the third, and it is the one that behaves differently from the rest: a Store page can be given its own URL and used as a landing page for social, email or influencer traffic. Amazon offers attribution reporting on that, which is the only place it will tell a brand what external traffic did.

Organic discovery inside Amazon is the fourth and it is close to nothing. Store pages do not compete in search results with products. Anybody building a Store expecting search traffic to it has misunderstood what it is.

Sponsored Brands can send a click to a Store page, and most campaigns send it to the home page. The click is usually worth more if it lands on the page that continues the search that produced it.

Match the page to the search. A shopper who searched for a type of product and clicked the brand's ad wants that type of product. A Store category page for it, with the best seller first, answers the search. The home page makes the shopper look for it again.

Build pages the campaigns need. If the advertising targets several distinct searches, each deserves a page: one per product type, use or need. Pages built for the advertising also serve the shoppers who arrive from the byline, so the work is not wasted.

Branded searches can go home. A shopper who searched for the brand's own name is looking for the brand. The home page, sorted the way shoppers choose, is the right landing for them.

Read each campaign against its page. Store insights show visits and sales per page, and the campaign reports show the clicks that went there. A page that receives clicks and converts badly is either the wrong page for the search or a page whose first screen is not doing its job.

Keep pages and campaigns in step. When a product sells out, or a page is retired, the campaigns pointing at it need changing the same day. A click sent to an empty page is spent and wasted.

Compare with a product landing. For a single product search, a click sent straight to the product page may convert better than one sent to the Store. Test both before deciding.

The default instinct is a homepage that says who the brand is: a large lifestyle image, a paragraph about heritage, values, founding. It reads well and it is the worst performing thing a Store can lead with, because it answers a question the visitor did not ask.

Somebody arriving at a Store has already seen a product. They are not deciding whether the brand is admirable. They are deciding whether it makes the other thing they need, and the fastest way to answer that is to show them the range organised the way they would sort it themselves. By type, by size, by use, by problem.

That is the same discipline that applies to a listing: the page has one job and the words at the top decide whether anybody reaches the ones lower down. It is worth reading alongside how product descriptions and supplier feeds interact, because a Store built from a feed inherits whatever the feed says.

Store insights report visitors, views, sales and units per page, and they are more useful than they look because they are per page rather than per Store. A category page with heavy traffic and no sales is a page whose products are wrong for the people arriving at it, which is a specific and fixable thing.

What the reporting will not do is attribute a sale to the Store when the shopper left it, browsed elsewhere and came back later, which is most of them. Treating Store revenue as the measure of whether a Store is working understates it every time. The more honest reading is direction: whether the pages people land on are sending them onward, and whether the range is being discovered rather than one product being bought repeatedly.

The same caution applies to every Amazon report, and knowing which ones repay reading is half the job. Brand analytics is worth understanding on its own terms.

A Store page has its own web address, which makes it a natural destination for a brand's social posts, emails and creator links when the aim is a sale on Amazon. Done carefully, it is also one of the few places Amazon tells a brand what that traffic did.

Tag each source. Store insights can report visits by source when the address carries a source tag, so a link in an email, a social post and a creator's bio can each be tracked separately. Untagged links all arrive as one anonymous number.

Use attribution for the sales. Amazon's attribution reporting measures what traffic from outside Amazon went on to buy, and brands enrolled in the Brand Referral Bonus can earn a credit on those sales. Amazon Attribution and the Brand Referral Bonus covers how to set it up.

Choose the page for the message. A post about one product should land on that product, or on the Store page where it sits first. A post about the brand can land on the home page. A shopper who arrives on a page that does not match what they clicked tends to leave.

Consider the shopper's device. Most social traffic arrives on a phone. Check that the Store page opens and reads well on mobile, and whether the link opens in a browser or the Amazon app, since the experience differs.

Compare with the brand's own site. Sending social traffic to Amazon trades the customer relationship for Amazon's conversion and trust. For some products and some audiences that is the right trade; for others the brand's own store earns more. Test both rather than defaulting to either.

Most Stores that work have three kinds of page, and each does one job. The home page sorts the range the way a shopper chooses, by use, size or need, rather than by the brand's own product lines. A page for each category puts the best seller first, because a shopper who has arrived from an advert for one product is most likely to buy that product or the one beside it. And one page for what is new or seasonal is the page that changes, so the rest can stay put.

Every product tile should lead to a listing that is in stock. A Store that sends a shopper to an unavailable product spends the click that brought them.

A brand with three or four products can still benefit from a Store, as long as it is built for what a small range needs rather than copied from a large brand's design.

One page can be enough. A single page with the products side by side, a short sentence on what each is for, and a comparison of the differences answers everything a shopper arriving from the byline wants to know. Extra pages with one product each add clicks without adding information.

Lead with the best seller. The product most shoppers buy belongs at the top, with the others presented as alternatives or additions: the larger size, the refill, the accessory that goes with it.

Show what goes together. If the products are used together, a section showing them as a set encourages a shopper who came for one to add another. This is where a small range gets most of its value from a Store.

Keep the build light. A small range does not need a large design project. A clean page, built quickly and kept current, does more than an elaborate one that goes out of date.

Grow it with the range. As products are added, the Store grows into category pages. Starting simple makes that easier than unpicking a complicated design built for a range that did not exist yet.

Put the listings first. For a small range especially, the listings decide the sales. A Store is worth building once the listings are in good order, not instead of them.

A Store earns its build when a brand has a range rather than a product, when something is already sending traffic that a Store could catch, and when the catalogue is stable enough that the Store will not be out of date in a quarter.

It does not earn it for a single product, for a catalogue that changes weekly, or as a substitute for the work on the listings themselves. A beautiful Store above a set of listings that do not convert is decoration on a problem. The listing is where the money is decided, which is why a campaign that spends without converting is almost never an advertising problem.

Built once and abandoned is the common failure. A Store is a set of pages, and pages go stale: discontinued products, a seasonal hero six months out of season, a category that no longer reflects what the brand sells. It wants a look every quarter, which is a smaller commitment than building it and the part most brands skip.

A Store is one part of a catalogue that has to hold together, and it is rarely the part that needs attention first. If the listings underneath it are the constraint, that is where to start, and it is the bulk of what Amazon account management actually consists of. Where the Store itself is the work, Brand Store design has its own page and its own price.