Amazon Stores -- Your Home Page on Amazon
How to Build Your Home Page on Amazon
Introduction
One of the few knocks on Amazon is that it’s hard turn a collection of ASINs into a trusted brand. Between the millions of listings and templated approach to detail pages there is not much opportunity to drive a strong brand narrative to tell your customers a story about why your brand exists.
This is where a a Brand Store comes into play. If you are a brand owner1, a well designed Amazon Store can be your Home Page on Amazon — the place for you to tell your story around why a customer shrouds trust and love your product over the countless other listings available on the site.
What’s the Point of a Store?
Most DTC sellers will tell you to remove any and all friction from purchasing funnel and a Store page does just the opposite of that advice. That being said, the purpose of a Store goes beyond the immediate transaction and is centered around building relationships with your customers rather than driving a single transaction.
Why is building a brand so import on Amazon? It’s expensive as shit to acquire a customer and the cost of traffic is continuing to climb with no end in sight. This means that you need customers to shop across the catalog and drive their Lifetime Value (LTV) in order to make your marketing spend work harder for you.
The good news is through smart merchandising, strong messaging, and R.E.D. creative2 your Store can take a customer from viewing a single product to an immersive experience that promotes cross-shop basket building and brand loyalty.
How to Make a Great Store
The goal of your store is two fold, First - customers can’t buy items they do not know exist. If you want to evolve from being listing-centric seller to brand that happens to sell on Amazon, you need to show customers the breadth of your assortment.
Second - Customers don’t care what you are selling, they care why you are selling it. You need to give customers a reason to care about your items. Be honest with yourself, your product might be better, but it’s not that much better than the competition. That’s why you need to focus on the “Why” of your brand.
Black Rifle Coffee is a fantastic example of focusing on the why. BRCC sells coffee, and it’s good, but it’s not going public for half a billion dollars good. How is it worth that much money? Easy - People love the brand!
Example: Black Rifle Coffee Company
Let’s take a deep dive into a Store page for a brand. We’ll use Black Rifle Coffee Company….BRCC is a great example of a Good product creating a Great brand. In this section I am going to walk you through the specifics of how Black Rifle Coffee Company is using their Store to focus on the brand and where they can improve and optimize their experience.
The Good
BRCC immediately meets the customer with an easy to digest taxonomy of their product. The navigation communicates a breadth of assortment and regardless of which ASIN drove the customer to the Store, the customer is now exposed to multiple product categories. What started with coffee grounds can now end with a the purchase of merchandise (i..e mugs) or cold brew coffee. Furthermore, the taxonomy breaks out a specific “About Us’ section….which is a goldmine for storytelling.
As the customer flows through the home page, they are quickly introduced to the “Good Stuff”…the reasons why customers care about the brand. There is a major focus on the Veteran Owned components of the company and a video that outlines the roasting process. Both of these tactics work to humanizes the brand and put a face to the the coffee that customers will eventually consume.
The Bad
While BRCC does a nice job with the landing page for their Store, there is a big opportunity to be more brand-forward. What does this mean? Move the video to the top of the page and really sell the customer on why they need to buy from Black Rifle over Starbucks or Dunkin’.
The other area that could be improved is the creative. Let’s put the creative through the R.E.D. criteria…
Relevant: The branding and creative is certainly culturally and socially relevant. Coffee is ubiquitous and cause-based brand campaigns are doing really well right now (think Allbirds and sustainability, REI and the Outdoors, etc.). BRCC passes the Relevance hurdle.
Easy: Is the creative easy to understand? Is it easy to engage? Check on both. The brand makes their Store page easy to navigate and understand.
Distinctiveness: Can anyone else replicate this experience? Does this have strong recall with the customer? I would argue NO. As a new customer, I don’t look at this creative and have a strong reaction nor does it immediately resonate with me in a a distinct manner. There is nothing about this creative that would cause me to unmistakably associate these assets with a specific brand.
If I were running BRCC’s Amazon business I would make focusing on the distinctiveness of their Store a major focus over the next few weeks and ensure that customer experience is heavily branded and ready to capture Holiday demand. Turkey 5 is a major drivers of acquiring new customers and you want to do everything you can to ensure you are building brand-loyal customers and not driving single transactions. From what I can tell, BRCC is an amazing brand that is doing a disservice to itself by not fully optimizing their Amazon Store experience.
Conclusion
Brand Stores are a great way drive exposure to your catalog and drive a narrative around your brand. Smart use of your storefront can accelerate the launch of new items and help to build brand affinity and grow customer lifetime value. Just remember, when designing your Store to make it R.E.D.!
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You must be enrolled in Brand Registry to have a Store.
You should read the book: R.E.D. Marketing: The Three Ingredients of Leading Brands