There are thousands of third party sellers on Amazon. Many of these sell their products only or mainly through Amazon, and many people start brands with the intention of only selling on Amazon and building success without incorporating sales and/or branding strategies outside of Amazon. With this in mind, it’s important to consider how Amazon can help or hurt the building of your brand equity.
People go to Amazon with the intention to shop and buy products – unlike Google visitors, who may be looking to shop, be entertained, or find information. The Amazon brand attracts shoppers with its promise of having everything from A to Z and offering exceptional customer service. For those trying to build their brands, it seems natural to want to offer your products on such a large platform, especially since visitors seeing your products are already there to shop. This can help to build awareness of your brand through the sheer volume of eyes that will be on your products.
However, brand building strategies must be built differently for Amazon. This is due to the high amount of competition on the platform, as well as the limitations that Amazon has put on sellers.
To build brand awareness and get eyes on your products, you need to have insight into Amazon’s unique search algorithms and ways to build your listings with keywords that can allow your products to show up in the search results. If you don’t invest the time and/or money into strategies such as Amazon SEO and review building, your brand equity will not improve because your product listings will never get to site visitors.
In building your product listings, you will likely want to showcase your branding through the tone and voice in the bullet points and product description, have images that talk about your brand, and create ads on Amazon that incorporate your branding. However, Amazon has many limitations on what you can and cannot include in the product listings, the ads, and the products themselves. For instance, you cannot have email addresses, phone numbers, or website URLs anywhere on the product listings or in the communication with customers via the internal Amazon messaging system. You also cannot include this information on any product inserts or invoices. Of course, this rule does not apply if the phone number or website URL is for Amazon themselves. This clearly limits the ability to connect with customers and convey your brand through communication.
You are also restricted as to what you can say in the product titles and on the product images. Furthermore, when building the listings, you have to consider how much brand voice and tone you want to offer versus incorporating keywords and phrases in ways that will make your product rank higher in search results.
Advertisements within Amazon are not very well suited for brand building, as they strongly limit what you can say on the ads and the images that you can include. Amazon does offer some branding assistance, such as Amazon “storefront”, which allows you to create a custom page to showcase your brand. However, the customers on Amazon rarely reach these brand storefronts, and they are more useful as landing pages for driving external traffic to Amazon.
With all of this being said, it is well worth it to sell your products on Amazon when trying to build your brand. However, it is necessary to also establish your brand outside of Amazon in order to properly and more fully convey your branding.