Amazon the king of ecommerce has finally taken a step to truly embrace F-commerce as Amazon Marketing Services launches customisable Amazon Pages with partial Facebook integration.
The self-service platform allows marketers to drive more sales of their products from a dedicate and branded Amazon hub. The move to trusting Amazon with your entire ecommerce operations might be accelerated by Click Frenzy issues en-counted by Australian shoppers this week. The Amazon Brands pages move also appears to be a proactive move to counter the upcoming Facebook store platform. The Brand product also appears to be a natural evolution of Amazon Brand Stores that required more resources from Amazon to roll out, this self-service model takes that development bottleneck away.
The key part of why this platform might work is that the branding on the custom URL, header and onpage content is all around building a stronger relationship with brands and but may also reduce cannibalisation from resellers & affiliates. The conversion rates will likely greatly improve for any retailers who take up the opportunity to secure a short branded URL such as…
- Amazon.com/Coles
- Amazon.com/Woolworths
- Amazon.com/DavidJones
- Amazon.com/Target
- Amazon.com/JBHiFi
- Amazon.com/OatMeal
- Amazon.com/Pinzon
- Amazon.com/Lipton
The one part that retailers will love about the platform is that it’s free which makes it attractive to smaller brands and boutique retailers looking to drive more sales via Amazon channels. The Brand pages feel very much like Pinterest and how Facebook should look with a large customisable hero widget, and flexible layouts. The example of how your page is broken up is shown in the screenshot below.
There are 3 core elements to Amazon Brand pages Amazon Pages, Amazon Posts & Amazon Analytics and all work together to give a fully function marketing platform for retailers. While only Facebook are currently intergrated with the platform it’s likely that Twitter & Pinterest will follow very soon considering the potential power of the brand page to be part of the daily marketing activities and and potentially replacing platforms like HootSuite for posting/sharing product links.
The pages product offers 3 choices of template to pick, one with all products, one with posts only and a combination of the two. Unlike Facebook hero images Amazon allows retailers to add a interactive product widget such as featured product. The featured product section works much like a rotating Amazon Associates banner, but there are also customisable links to point to other products or other listings on Amazon.
Amazon Posts is meant to link between social media and sales, so businesses can promote from Amazon and Facebook at the same time but you can also schedule future posts/updates to encourage more of your fans to visit your Amazon Brand page and buy your products.
One of the coolest features of the Amazon Brand pages is the Amazon Analytics platform that helps guide your decisions by giving you awesome metrics on how your audience interacts within your Brand pages shown in the screenshot below. By offering brands insight that is not available to anyone else such as Brand Reach, Views, Considerations and Purchase uplift.
I think the new brand pages on ensure Amazon is once again taken seriously by retailers who will be seriously considering how they can leverage the new brand pages now that they have some ROI measurement built into the platform. Also being able to setup multiple brand pages makes the platform suitable for global brands who can localise their brand messaging and product offering. I am slightly surprised that they are not following Facebook from day one that is rolling out their central global page platform with local regional controls.
So I’m not yet sure how easy the brand pages are to setup and use and even how their web analytics works, or if you need to have your own products but I’ve applied and will see how long it takes and hopefully I won’t get declined.