Planning an Amazon Brand Store That Earns Its Place

A Brand Store is a free, multi-page storefront on Amazon that you lay out yourself. It is the only place on the marketplace where the whole page belongs to your brand: no competitor ads, no other sellers' offers, just your products arranged the way you choose. That makes it valuable and easy to misuse. Many Stores are built as a digital catalog, published and forgotten, because no one decided what job they were meant to do. This article covers how to plan one that earns its place, how to send traffic to it, how to measure it and what it cannot do.

Start with the job, not the template

Most shoppers reach your products through search results and product pages, never the Store. So a Store is not a primary traffic source. Its value is in specific situations where a single product page is the wrong destination: when someone wants to see a range, when a campaign has a theme, and when a shopper arrives from outside Amazon with brand-level intent.

Pick one or two jobs before you open the builder:

• Orient shoppers who want to browse the full range, by need, size or use.
• Give Sponsored Brands ads and other campaigns a branded destination.
• Give social posts, email and creators one link to share that works for the whole brand.
• Show a story and a standard of quality that a single listing has no room to tell.

A Store built to do all of these at once usually does none of them well. If you can state the job in one sentence, the structure follows from it.

Plan the page structure on paper

The common mistake is to mirror your internal product lines. Shoppers do not think in your categories. They think in needs: gifts, travel, starter sets, for a large dog, for a small kitchen. Organize pages around the questions your shoppers ask, and use the language they use in search terms and reviews.

A typical shape is a home page, a handful of subpages and a page for each campaign theme. The home page should say what the brand is for and send people deeper through clear category tiles. Each subpage should be a short answer to one question and end at products.

Here is a hypothetical example. A brand that sells accessories for dogs might have a home page, then pages for walking, travel and small dogs, plus a gift sets page that it can use for the holiday season and then retire. A shopper arriving from a social post about car travel goes straight to the travel page and sees the harness, the seat cover and the water bowl together, instead of searching three separate listings.

Tiles: what each one is for

The Stores builder assembles pages from tiles, and the set of tile types changes over time. They fall into a few families, and each one has a job:

• Image and video tiles carry the story and the brand look. Use them at the top of a page and to introduce a section.
• Text tiles explain, but long paragraphs rarely get read. Keep them to a sentence or two.
• Shoppable images tag products inside a lifestyle scene, which is useful when the setting sells the product.
• Product grids and automated groups, such as best sellers, show products that come from your catalog and keep their price and rating current.

Design for the phone first, because many shoppers browse there, and open the mobile preview on every page. Then let products dominate: a page of banners that makes a shopper scroll before seeing a product has the proportions wrong. A short set of rules keeps pages from drifting into decoration:

• State what the page is for in the first screen, and lead with products or a clear route to them.
• Use short text and large, simple images, and keep the main category links where a shopper sees them without scrolling.
• Link every tile to a product, a page or a collection, and leave no dead ends.
• Skip long brand stories: a short statement and a strong image do more than a wall of text.

Amazon reviews Stores before they go live and publishes content guidelines, so read them before you finalize copy. Claims you could not put on a listing do not become acceptable on a Store page.

Using the Store as a landing page

The Store earns most of its keep as a destination. Sponsored Brands campaigns can send shoppers to a Store page instead of a product detail page, and some formats allow a specific Store subpage. This works when the ad promises a range or a theme: a gift set campaign can land on a Store page of gift sets, where a shopper compares several products without hitting a competitor's ad. A campaign for one product should still go to that product's page, where the reviews and the buy button live.

For traffic from outside Amazon, a Store link gives social posts, email and creator content a single page that suits a browsing mindset. Tag those links with Amazon Attribution so you can see what each source delivers. Link to a product page when the post is about one product, and to a themed Store page when it is about a collection.

Measure it with Store insights

The Stores builder includes an insights view with traffic and sales information for the Store. The exact metrics change, but they typically cover visits, page views, sales and traffic sources, often broken down by page. Read them to answer three questions.

• Which sources send people to the Store, and do the visitors from each source buy?
• Which pages are visited and which are skipped? A page nobody visits should be fixed, merged or dropped.
• Where do shoppers leave? A page with many views and few clicks onward needs clearer tiles or fewer words.

Pair the Store view with your ad reports, since ad-driven Store visits show up in both places. Compare a Store landing page with a product page for the same campaign over the same dates, with the same budget, so the destination is the only thing that changes.

What a Store can and cannot do

A Store is also content that ages. When you add products, launch a bundle or change a hero image, update the pages that mention them, and review the insights every month or two.

Where to start

• Write the Store's main job in one sentence.
• List the questions shoppers ask and group your products to answer them.
• Sketch the home page and subpages on paper before opening the builder.
• Check every page in the mobile preview and link every tile somewhere useful.
• Send one campaign to the Store and compare it with a product page destination.
• Review Store insights monthly and prune pages that nobody visits.