How to Create an Amazon Store: 10 Essential Steps

When you’re selling on Amazon, you’re selling on Amazon; that is, Amazon is like a huge store on the web, and you’re selling products within that store. When customers buy your products, they remember they bought them on Amazon, but they usually forget they bought them from you (assuming it even registered in their brains).

However, when you have your own store, you can build your own recognizable brand and start generating repeat sales. By building and maintaining your own store, you won’t have to compete so much with other sellers on Amazon when selling to repeat customers.

In this article, we explain how to build your own store on Amazon, and use it to boost sales and build brand recognition.

What are Amazon Stores?

If you’re a Professional Seller on Amazon and have your own brand in the Amazon Brand Registry, you can create your own branded store on Amazon and list and sell your products from that store. 

Amazon Stores provide Professional Sellers who are brand owners a free, self-service webstore builder and store address, such as Amazon.com/YourBrandName.

As a registered brand owner, you can build your own store on Amazon for free, which can help in building brand recognition among Amazon shoppers. Building and managing your own Amazon Store is easy, and it doesn’t complicate the ordering process for you or your Amazon customers.

Nearly all the large brands that sell on Amazon have their own Amazon Store and a website or store outside Amazon.

You can point your ads and links to your own dedicated store so that potential customers can shop virtually and benefit from increased traffic rather than just seeing your products appear alongside your competitors.

What Do Amazon Stores Have to Offer?

In addition to providing your brand with a dedicated area to market and categorize your products, Amazon Stores also comes with a range of other useful features.

1. Amazon Advertising

Stores on Amazon are a part of the Amazon Advertising program, which means you can market your brand both on and off Amazon. With a tag added to your store’s URL, you can easily track and gain valuable insights into shopping behavior, sales, conversions, demographics, and much more to inform future ad campaigns. Learn more about Amazon advertising. 

2. Amazon Brand Registry

In order to open an Amazon store, you will need to go through the Amazon Brand Registry process, if you haven’t already. Having your brand registered on Amazon gives you more control over the branding of your products. In addition, Amazon’s automated protections can identify any inaccurate or infringing content and help you remove it from the platform. Learn more about how to build a brand on Amazon. 

3. Brand Analytics

Amazon’s analytics features allow you to gain insight and analyze your store’s success once your brand is registered. Sellers with registered brands can access Brand Analytics, which provides data that allows you to examine competitors, compare products similar to your own and analyze the demographics of your customers in terms of age, income, gender, education, and more.

Through Brand Analytics, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target market, the top search terms used on your brand, and the conversion rates for various products and categories.

How to Create an Amazon Store

In order to help you stand out, we have created a list of key steps for setting up and optimizing an Amazon storefront.

1. Professional Seller Account

You must create an Amazon seller account if you are not already selling on the site.

You will need to provide:

• Account name
• Business address
• Tax identification number
• Identity verification
• Bank statement
• Payment details for Amazon fees
• Bank account information for your bi-weekly deposits

Learn more about how to create an Amazon seller account. 

2. Amazon Brand Registry

The next step in creating an Amazon Store is to register your Amazon Brand with the Amazon Brand Registry. It’s only available to brands with active trademarks on their packaging and products.

You will get access to valuable features such as gated product categories, increased advertising opportunities, brand messaging advice, lifestyle images, and other marketing tools when your brand is officially registered.

To get started with Amazon Brand Registry, you will need:

• Registered and trademarked brand name
• Registered brand serial number
• Countries in which your product is made and sold
• Your company’s logo on your product
• A picture of your brand name on the label of your product
• Your product image

3. Choosing a unique and recognizable domain name

If you build an Amazon Store, its domain name will be something like Amazon.com/YourBrand. A short, simple, and catchy name is easy for shoppers to remember, pronounce, and type. In addition, it can make a great logo for your brand. Try different combinations of short names or try tweaking a popular word or phrase to suit to your brand.

Your domain name should reflect the products and services you offer, but it should differ from whatever your competitors are already using. Think of something clever and maybe even funny depending on the look and feel of the brand you want to convey.

Make sure the domain name you’re thinking of using doesn’t violate any other individual’s or organization’s intellectual property rights. Research Google and the trademark registry at the United States Patents and Trademarks Office to find out if the domain name you’re thinking of using is too close to the name of an existing business or organization.

4. Prepare Graphics (including, maybe, videos)

Most shoppers are stimulated by visuals, so you want your store and product listings to be visually appealing and informative. As you gather content to include on your site, be sure to include the following graphic content:

• Branding assets: These items include your brand’s logo, fonts, and color scheme, which all contribute to the overall appearance of your webstore.
• High-quality product photos: Because shoppers can’t see or touch the actual product in your store, as they can in a physical store, you need to provide clear, detailed product photos that enable shoppers to see your products from every angle. According to one survey, about two-thirds of shoppers said high-quality product photos are more important than product descriptions in helping them make purchase decisions.
• Product-demo photos or videos: When relevant, include product photos or videos that show the product being used. For certain products, demonstrating how easy the product is to use or how well it works is a great way to increase sales conversions. For some products, you may also want to include assembly photos, illustrations, or videos.
• Buyer-generated photos or videos: Consider including, within individual product pages, a way for people who bought the product to share their product photos and videos. Amazon allows customers to share their product photos and videos when they post product reviews, and these photos and videos are a great way to showcase your products being used.

5. Write content for product pages and descriptions

Every ecommerce website has a page for each product and service the business offers, but ecommerce websites have, or should have, additional pages to welcome shoppers, keep them engaged and informed, and enable them to find the information they need. Each of these pages requires both graphic and text-based content.

As you plan your Amazon store, be sure to prepare text to populate the following pages:

Homepage: Your webstore’s homepage should welcome shoppers and provide them an easy means to navigate your site and find what they’re looking for. Include on your homepage the following:

• A clear value proposition that communicates the benefits of your brand and the products you offer
• Contact info, such as, email address, phone number, and a link to chat live
• Call to action, such as a way to search for a product or check out one of your featured products

Landing pages: These pages showcase specific products or promotions and are specifically designed to sell something. These are pages linked to your email marketing campaigns and online advertisements. Consider including the following content on each landing page:

• Details about the product or promotion
• One or more customer testimonials
• Time limit or quantity in stock limit to convey urgency
• Call to action (typically a button to order the product)

Product pages: To create your product pages, you need the following text, which you can get from your existing product listings on Amazon:

• Product title
• Product description
• Bullet points highlighting each product’s features and benefits
• Product reviews/ratings

Collection pages: A collection page is a category or group of related products, such as electronics, games, or videos; sale items; seasonal products; or makes/models, such as accessories for a certain model of cellphone. You may want to link to your collection pages from your webstore’s homepage. (You don’t need much additional content to create your collection page. You just need to decide on your product groupings.)

Blog pages: Blog posts are an excellent way to attract search engine traffic by establishing your blog as the go-to source for information about the products you sell. Search engines love sites with fresh, relevant content, and twice-a-week blog posts provide a constant stream of fresh content. In addition, blog posts encourage readers to post their own content, so your site can benefit from having fresh, relevant content that you don’t have to create.

6. Configure the menu

If you’re a Professional Seller and registered brand owner on Amazon, you can use Amazon’s self-service Store builder to create and edit your Amazon Store. 

Even without any design experience, you can easily create a branded store and populate it with your product listings. 

To create a new Amazon Store, open the Stores menu and select Create Store (next to your brand name). 

Enter your brand’s name as you want it to appear in your Store’s uniform resource locator (URL). For example, if you use LugoBar as the brand name, the URL will be amazon.com/LugoBar, and shoppers will need to type “amazon.com/LugoBar” and not “amazon.com/lugobar” to access your store. (Amazon.com isn’t case-sensitive, but everything after the forward slash is.)

When possible, create a list of general, parent categories with more specific subcategories within each parent category, but keep the category-subcategory “tree” shallow. Using subcategories enables shoppers to focus their search for products, but if they need to go deeper than three or four levels, they’re more likely to lose interest or get frustrated.

When a menu has a parent category with numerous subcategories, shoppers often try to click the parent category, which may or may not be selectable or, if it is selectable, clicking it opens a blank page. Be sure the parent category is selectable and that it links to a page that lists the parent category’s subcategories. Otherwise, some shoppers will get confused or frustrated, and your conversion rates will suffer.

7. Build Your Pages

Follow the on-screen instructions to upload your brand logo, then press the Next button. Amazon’s Store builder displays controls for building a page, which consists of selecting a template on the left and then creating your page in the panel on the right.

In the Page Description box (in the left panel), enter a brief summary of the page content. This description will appear under the page title in search engine results.

Select a template (in the left panel) to specify the desired layout for the page. You can start with a blank page. After you choose a template, a page appears (in the panel on the right) showing the page structure without any content added. Each page consists of a collection of tiles, each of which can contain a different type of content:

• Product
• Text
• Image (grid or carousel)
• Video

Press the Preview Desktop button (above the center panel) to preview the page with the content you added.

To add a new page to your store, click the Add a Page button (in the leftmost panel) and repeat Steps 4 to 9.

8. Add Content Tiles

To add a tile, select + Add Tile on the page and, in the panel on the right, select the content type for the new tile.

To add content to a tile or edit a tile’s existing content, click the tile. A new panel appears on the right, which enables you to add or edit the tile’s content.

Use the controls in the panel on the right to add or edit the tile’s content, then select Done (at the top of the rightmost panel) to save your changes.

Note that the rightmost panel includes a Delete button (near the bottom) to remove the tile from the page.

9. Upload Your Products

You should ensure that all your products are uploaded and optimized effectively if you are a new Amazon seller. There is a good chance you already have a range of products in place. You can search for products on your Amazon Store by using your products Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN).

ASIN numbers can be manually added to your store, or you can let Amazon fill your store for you by using relevant and specific keywords.

Every product you sell should have a UPC to help you track inventory and sales. A universal product code (UPC) consists of a machine-readable bar code and a human-readable 12-digit number that identifies a product. UPCs were developed to help grocery stores increase the speed and accuracy of the checkout process, and they can do the same to help you as a retailer. 

When you’re creating product listings, be sure to include each product’s UPC, which you can obtain from the following sources:

• The product manufacturer
• GS1 US (gs1us.org), where you can register to obtain a GS1 Company Prefix and use it to create your bar codes

10. Publish 

After completing your Store, press the Submit for Publishing button (in the upper-right corner of the Store builder).

Amazon displays your publishing options, so choose the option that works best for you:

• Standard Publishing makes your store available to shoppers as soon as your content is approved by Amazon’s moderation team. To select this option, press the Submit button next to this option.
• Scheduled Publishing enables you to request the date and time you would like your store to be made available to Amazon shoppers. To use this option, check the Request Publish Date box, choose your desired date and time, and press the Submit button.

After you submit your store using either publishing option, it will be reviewed to ensure compliance with Amazon’s policies. Amazon will notify you when the review is complete, and you can check the status in the status bar.

Final Words

By building an Amazon store, you can have a dedicated and ULR for your brand to stay away from competitors. 

It also allows you to use Brand Analytics to help you gain a better understanding of your target marketing.

However, before launching your store, I’d suggest you to hire an objective third party to check your site and provide feedback. Don’t ask for opinions from your family; they love you and will only give praise.

Of course, the worst idea is to check the site yourself; you’ll likely overlook something important. Trust me, I’ve built a 6-figure Amazon brand.

If you need more guidance, sign up for my online business coaching.