Most Amazon brand stores aren't good because they don't have a merchandising strategy

And it’s costing lots of brands hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue a year

Because optimized brand stores can generate between 10%-35% of a brand’s Amazon revenue

Consumers are most likely to buy the top 20% of items in your catalog

That means you need to get consumers to those items and categories as easily as possible…reduce friction

At the same time, you want them to buy more by strategically placing complementary products next to your top sellers to build the basket

Yet most brands fail to do this

Below are five actionable steps you can take to improve your merchandising strategy:

Step 1: Make Your Brand's Value Prop Clear

When a shopper lands on your homepage, they should have a general idea of what you sell based on your imagery and copy above the fold

Step 2: Make Your Homepage Accessible

Customers also shouldn’t have to scroll down more than halfway to be able to see shoppable products

Scroll fatigue is real

Step 3: Ensure Your Branding Is Consistent

Beyond the homepage, it’s vitally important that you also ensure your branding is consistent

Your blocking, fonts, blocking, button placement and size should all be consistent from the home page to the subpages (and even your PDPs)

Before we start any brand store (or creative work for that matter), we do a branding plan for Amazon to ensure that we lock in the brand’s style guide and brand guidelines so that we can be consistent with the branding

Step 4: Design for the Shopping Journey

In addition to ensuring the design is consistent, you also need to make sure you optimize your store for how customers search and shop.

Sometimes this is simple (e.g., you sell men’s and women’s’ shoes) and sometimes it is not (e.g., you sell different types of tools that could comprise 20-40 categories or you sell car parts for a bunch of different models and makes)

Step 5: Don't Overwhelm Shoppers

Lastly, you don’t have to include every single product that you sell on your store.

If you really want to, you can include shop all pages or sub-subpages with all the products for each respective category.

Again, you already know what shoppers are most likely to buy, so your job is to get them there and upsell them along the way

Therefore, feature the products that you know customers are most likely to buy, and bundle those products into macro-level categories

One caveat: rules are meant to be broken if you’re generating a lot of traffic or running a lot of paid media outside of Amazon on specific products

If you’re an established brand and want help taking your store to the next level don’t hesitate to reach out to Nectar or me

Below are homepages that the Nectar team created for various brand stores, including Ninja, Chuckit!, Earth Rated, Gotham Steel, Made In, Vibes, and Hero