Storefront Deep Dive

A 20-minute dive into why storefronts are so important on Amazon right now, and the macro and micro strategies you can implement to optimize yours.

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Transcript

So today I'm going to do a deep dive into Amazon storefronts. We're going to look at why firstly, we create a storefront. Secondly, with angle, look at the macro and micro strategies to optimize the store from first and foremost, endless cooking. Why do we actually want to create it? And again, as some of the other recent podcasts I've done, I'm just going to read off the script here.
I've written this down, put some effort into it. So excuse me, rattling this out a little bit. First and foremost customers want to see more from you from brands. So we create a website because we want a home for our customers to discover you and your product range. Also, though, to discover your why now answering simple questions, like why does this brand exist?
Why should I not just buy from this brand, but more buy into this? And within my mountain strategy, I refer to what I call brand touchpoints. Every time a customer or a prospect interacts with your brand. It's a touch point, right? And you're responsible for building a connection with them with each of those touch points, invoking emotion at each.
Now on Amazon, you've got two major top, which I've talked about a few times before on different podcasts and the major, because they're the ones that are going to primarily drive the flywheel. Now the flywheel is being driven by conversion rate and by volume, along with a number of other things. So your first touch point, your primary touch point is always going to be the listing.
And I've done an A-plus deep dive before, which goes into this and examines it further. The second big touch point though, is the storefront. Now I've put them in this order. At the point of writing and the point of speaking, because most transactions at the moment are happening on the detail page on the listing.
Although we now can convert customers right on the store page, which we'll talk about later. So therefore they're becoming a lot more important as we were able to do this. And this is John to storefronts driving conversion rates, which obviously drive orders up in value as well as order frequency up directly from the store, which in turn drives your flywheel pushing products up the sales ranks.
As obviously your product rankings improve your increase, your organic visibility. You get more page views for those top keywords, your sales go work, go up. And that flywheel kind of kicks into action. So it's really valuable when it comes back to that first question, why create a storefront? Because if we optimize the storefront, we make it really, really strong.
We optimize it. This touch point is going to have a direct impact on your product. Now, if we move on to how we can optimize a storefront, there are two different layers like I did with the a plus, um, deep dive. When we look at macro and micro strategies, first, we can look at the macro as a rule of thumb.
We want it to replicate the website. And when I say website, I mean your brand's website. Now your storefront should feel very similar to it. When a customer lands on moves from Instagram to your website for argument's sake, they know that it's yours. If they search on Google and find your website, they should immediately be able to find and see a similar tones of what they've got in the store.
We're looking to make them basically same, same, but different. Um, and that comes from the tones that we use. Um, the color schemes that we use, the fonts that we use, uh, an overall kind of demeanor on that side, everything needs to look and feel the same. This in turn is going to build trust. It removes some of the friction and it also adds legitimacy to you.
Which is particularly important as Amazon now. And a number of large, um, Chinese sellers are blowing up all these brands. Um, Amazon are allowing these Chinese sellers to blow up loads of these brands, driving a lot of fake reviews, scandals, and a lot of these brands that are coming out. Aren't actually proper brands that kind of fake brands in my opinion, and they don't have website.
So I think there's a big followup. Now, a lot of customers leaving Amazon and checking out to see if they do have a website then going back. Now, what we want is a really strong website, obviously, but we want a really strong storefront. So they're very parallel and they look the same and that where we can essentially different.
So mimicking the other side is number one. That second big point is navigation. And this is probably what I see most, or just make no effort. In fact, I would say as a rule of thumb, most brands, but very little effort into their store from, and it is such a wasted opportunity. So a common mistake is throwing all of your products onto one page.
I see this far too often, and it's the worst that you can possibly do because it's a terrible customer. Because we're not essentially helping our customers. It's like going to TK, max, I'm sorry if you work there or this is a big kind of passionate, you always go into TK Maxx. But what often happens is you've got loads of good stuff in there, but also a mix of loads of bad stuff.
And it's not a fun experience kind of pulling apart these different things and that's something we want to avoid. Okay. And that's not necessarily to say. Poor stuff and you sell good stuff. It's just to say that we want to strive to make the customer experience as good and strong as possible. And this itself is a touchpoint and one invokes, more positive emotion than negative.
Now, many of you perhaps have shopped with parents, mothers, particularly mine tends to be a bit more content with a bad experience. When you go into. Well, as I know, I've been with my dad and TK Maxx and he's just gone fuck this. I'm out of it because it's a not very good experience is painful for him just to find what he wants and separate stuff from me.
He dislikes what he likes, or it doesn't need to what he needs perhaps with less explosives. So you need to create a virtual shop assistant as the way I like to think about it. When a prospect lands on your page, you must be thinking, how can I make this easier for them? That is a very good rule of thumb and working on your store for over and over again, to optimize that simplicity.
Now, a good way to do this is simply categorize and you can categorize, but all manner of things. But one way, I like to think of it. Um, is the different types of customers you've got coming on or coming to your page, perhaps they're categorized by pain point or by problems. Ultimately though, we're usually shopping because we've got a problem and a looking for a solution.
So what common traits your customers have? Right. And an example would be, you know, a dentist product. I should really know what category this is that we've just taken on a new client and this niche, but let's say dentist product brand may have prospects with bad breath as well as prospects with sensitive teeth.
So these are two pain points. So what you'd look to do is direct storefront traffic, accordingly, structuring that home page show on one level, you have pain points. Then beneath that you stipulate bad breath and sensitive teeth. Now you see how this immediately therefore makes the shopping experience more enhanced, a bit more buttery for your customers because we're removing friction.
Having this at a forefront of your mind when building a structure is obviously paramount to you having a really strong storefront, and we want the customers to essentially float through the store and they can do this by us kind of holding their hands. Also, I mentioned having different levels on the homepage.
We could have a pain point on one level, but we could always have another filter level such as age or product type. And this really depends obviously on your niche, but the key is to essentially have these levels wherever they may be. And you're not strictly narrowed down into one level. You could look to go kind of the demographics such as age, but you could also then go to product type and have two there just to make the whole experience a little bit more battery.
Like I said, the ultimate aim. Is for the customer to enjoy that experience. So my mom, for instance, will wonder around John Lewis for literally years because she likes the experience. Although more recently she has is that she prefers Gerald's department store in Norwich, which I guess reinforces how we can always be better and always.
Now next macro point is education. Many brands assume it's obvious what the benefits of that product are, but that isn't always the case. So France answers, for example, with natural deodorant, you won't experience any benefit for the first three days, it will actually get. And this is because your pores are essentially are unblocking themselves during the first few days from when you've used other products and this unblocking period.
Isn't very nice, but it's necessary. Now, if a customer had to start using your product as a natural deodorant, without knowing this, they think the product is pretty rubbish. Three days in at now probably never smells. But through education, we can negate this risk in risk, the gate, the risk increasing the likelihood of a positive experience and helping our customers on their way to become brand advocates.
Now, we want to dedicate content on our storefront, educate our customers, just we do an a plus, right. Therefore, very powerful by the gate in that risk and increasing the likelihood of a positive experience and increase the likelihood of potential conversions as well. We can also educate our customers based on their pain points or problems with pain points.
We can refer them to solutions Simmons. How are we doing on our detail page? But we store funds. We've got a lot more flexibility and that's how that's so powerful. We've got a lot more stuff we can do than what we can do with a plus. We really want to be capitalizing. So an example of this would be, we don't have videos at the moment I plus, unless you got A-plus.
But videos are great because they can educate essentially more efficiently than images. So in ensuring you're including them for each product in your range or for your range, if one kind of video describes the whole process, for instance, let's say chair making and you explain how. You make chairs differently because you use a certain type of word, then, then that would go really well on the storefront because it's educating them on your process.
Put it next step is emotion. As a rule of thumb. I talk about this a lot and it's always coming back to how do we invoke an emotion? Across every touch point that we have from the storefront and the listing to your customer service, to your unboxing, it's always, how do we know vocal emotion? And the storefront is no different.
We have an option tunity on the store to do this more so than kind of anywhere else in Amazon, because of that flexibility. I mentioned before this ties back to the navigation piece as well, where I set the need to enjoy being on your page. The videos obviously are going to help with this. You can do an excellent job though, with just really good graphics and a compelling story.
So you can still work with graphics, save the money on the video. So it's not that kind of a must right there, but obviously it's good. Yeah. Type of customers also discuss this slightly navigator section, but let's go a little bit deeper if we really think about the different customers you have and then create an experience accordingly.
So PowerBar, for instance, in the UK had this set up on their storefront. They cater to cyclists and they also cater to runners. What they do is a second up there, visitors. Did therefore have a sub page of each. They create content that speaks to a cyclist on one page and then to a runner on. Now the products are actually very similar on each of these pages, but the messaging and the education is quite different.
How it's delivered is different and how a cyclist can use those products is different in comparison to how runner can. So educating them then comes into this. And you can do this across a number of different things. So if we go back to our identity brand, there may be three different types of, um, toothpaste that could be suitable for them.
And when we've sat on the, um, you know, the shelf and had to look at them, it can be quite difficult. One of the benefits of a digital experience is we can answer problems that the customer didn't necessarily know their hat, same goes here, helping them make that decision easier by doing the comparison and by segments in them, like almost kind of doing a survey.
On your website, where you go kind of, what type of teeth do you have? How old are you? X, Y, Z. And you're navigating them around. So a suitable product. Think about how you can do this with your, um, with your storefront. Now, the why or the bounce, not a big. Every store should essentially have a wire and about page customers want to find out more about you robbing them of this is essentially a disservice in my mind telling them why.
Tell them your why? Sorry. Deepens your relationship from day one and increases the likely to conversions advocates highlights on value amongst many of them. And in addition to this with Amazon rolling out brands left run at sensor, it's paramount that you differentiate by having a soul. And that's a term I've been using a lot recently.
Same goes with your competent competition from China. You're unlikely to burn on the price and the longterm is going to get increasingly more competitive. And in my opinion, with the likes of Amazon, China, and aggregators, they're always going to win on price because of their pockets. Your advantage is yourself.
Is your why? And that's how you can differentiate final piece on the macro front is mobile. No surprise here. 24% of shoppers prefer to shop a mobile. This was from CPC strategy back in 2018, which is smaller than the 67% that preferred. It miscellany, this is three years old. So we can imagine those figures are different.
I imagine mobile probably going up a little bit, but regardless, we can still assume that at least a quarter of customers prefer buying on mobile and Dubai mobile more. So we need to build a store with that in mind. And always as a good rule of thumb, start opening up your storefront on your mobile when you're in that creation process, to see how it looks and feels, see how easy it is to navigate.
See how educational is. If things are chopped off or resized or not able to be viewed. So coming up from the good forefront is a good starting point. But also look to do is perhaps get your store fund in the hands of your customers. If you can see how they actually like to shop and see if they've got any pain points they're putting into your Facebook group, email list, your top customers, who you may communicate more closely with getting in their hands and asking their opinions, which is kind of another point on this.
Now down to the micro strategies, it's obvious we've had macro that. Are you plus sub page is what I've labeled this as. And essentially what I mean by this is you should treat each sub page like an eight plus page. Now I previously spoke about how to structure an A-plus page. So I'm not going to try and repeat too much of the information.
You can go listen to that podcast episode, but by following the same macro and micro guidelines, as I outlined with the A-plus on your storefront page, You're going to create a really strong experience, which obviously, and as late as I mentioned, that why earlier on it's a higher conversion rates than average order?
Now it's certainly going to be an easier process here. If you've got a smaller range, as you create a sub page for each Jason, quite simple, as the range gets bigger, you may look to great one for each of your ranges or categories or male. It's great sections, which focus on top sellers and then new and up and coming products that you're excited about.
Then for those top sellers, you can repurpose some of the A-plus plus you've already. And it looks a bit different size on that top seller page. So we're still creating the A-plus experience. Um, but driving home, those top sellers are also driving home. Those, those new products you wanna get off the ground.
Additionally modules with the product benefits, features and lifestyle shops, and obviously videos into the mix wherever possible. That's powerful. We want to be utilized the different types of content we've got available. Okay. And now if you have less than 20 products, so I would be encouraging you to create 20 sub pages.
In my opinion is obviously going to be a bit of work, but it's a really rich experience which compels the customer to essentially buy with fewer clicks. They don't need to visit your ACE and page to get that. Additionally, it may also increase your conversion rate in comparison to the Asian ACM page, because at the moment, there is no competition on your store page.
There are no ads running on your store page, or there are ads and lots of comp competitors on your ACE and page. So if we pull some of that concept from the A-plus and the main images over, we can compel them to buy with fewer clicks. So it's a far to conversion, but also drive the conversion rate up because we haven't got the competition.
Additionally, within these sub pages, I always referenced kind of bookmarking it with a why, so, why we exist at the end. So if they are landing on a sub page and the reading through that, you've got the why at the end, perhaps that links back to your why page as always combined those two really rich, compelling content, because that's also going to drive everything we're doing.
Which brings me nice lawn micro strategy pair on videos. Now we can have videos on there. Let's ensure we do videos convert at a much higher percentage. You can look at using if you could, a big range, kind of bolt video tools, where you essentially have moving images with text overlays and you can get a lot of that work and had done for you can even upload them via Excel, et cetera.
So give us a shout. If you want some recommendations there USP's yep. Ensuring we're bringing these to the forefront. The product benefits are putting on to that. Front and sub pages and that kind of A-plus style piece of content. Don't leave these USP's for the listing, but you want to be bringing them up the funnel essentially.
So you can aim to convert them a little bit earlier. No competition. I mentioned this before there was at this point in time. No competition and the storefront is great because it gives you an opportunity to drive at the conversion rate. Um, if you've got enough product related content, then. I imagine this is probably going to change in the future.
Would it be surprised how aggressively Amazon are rolling out types? If they come and actually rolled something out on the store, from which again, it encouraged us to never have a strong store from problem solving for different customers. As I mentioned earlier on, we would categorize all the problems that your customers face and create content that speaks specifically to that.
So if they've got bad breath, perhaps you've taught. What causes this issue and then what is a solution to this issue? I certain ingredients and then what products and work for you. And that would be a classic example of how that works. Final rule of thumb or second file of all the thumb is high quality content.
Um, we want to be impactable throughout really comes down to my opinion, the investment you make in the process, both from a time and money perspective. Now I've been working a lot on the concept piece recently, helping some brands I haven't heard from on the results or what's come out really, really good if they're investing time and energy on their side.
Now if brand owners can't be bothered or kind of people who are responsible for this and the team can't be bothered to really invest time and effort in the results were always a lot worse. So, as an example, we now ask clients to fill out. I know on onboarding form, essentially it takes about 15 minutes.
It's a bit of hard work we ask for things like what they like, what they don't like, why they like, and don't like things, um, brand pallets or do these things that we really get nitty gritty. Some people rush through it. Some people give it more information and put a lot of thought into it, which always ends up creating a much better and stronger result down the line than those who don't invest as much, because we're not as aligned the final piece, which is just kind of an add on is buyable modules always.
So coming back to the point of, we want that conversion to happen on the storefront because there's less competition sending them to the store. Um, the detail page. It gives a, an opportunity for them not to be converted. So these Bible margins are essentially. Images where you have an option to click inside that image and basically pin things inside the image.
So a really good way you can make this work is with lifestyle images. So an example would be a kitchen setup that looks brilliant. Then each item has a pin. So when you hover over the pin, you get some information, you get the outer basket. So what we're doing is we're selling them on that lifestyle image, future pacing them into a life right in front of them, that they could technically experience.
And then hopefully we're enjoying the benefits of them going, yes. I want to buy this whole experience and you get the nice average automatically web, which is a powerful thing we want to be utilizing right now. Okay. Folks, any questions on the storefronts? Give us a shout. Hopefully that's been beneficial.
Hopefully it gives you some directions. Obviously show notes has got the transcript for this, so you can read over it as well. Thanks. Right. Have a good day.