Amazon Brand Shopping

November 2019 - October 2021
In late 2019 I joined Amazon to build a new team straddling Amazon Ads and Retail. With the continuing expansion of small brand and OEM sellers on Amazon, customers were vocal about the need for more information on the legitimacy of products from brands they knew and background on brands they didn’t know. Simultaneously, Amazon sellers with established brands were struggling to bring their brand story to Amazon customers and challenger brands struggled to compete with established brands through existing tools. Over two years, we launched and refined three major brand products that combined paid advertising placements and organic personalized placements throughout the shopping journey. Our aim was to serve customers with relevant brand content to help them discover new brands, buy from brands they trust, and feel secure in their purchase decisions.

Lego Brand Store on Amazon | Amazon search results for “Puma”

Phase 1: Build brand touchpoints and content

To launch the brand-shopping initiative our team led the CX design of three core products aimed at creating opportunities for brands to showcase their products and for customers to experience new content types on Amazon. Each of the products focused on a different strategy for growing brands on Amazon.

Provide a brand specific shopping destination: Our team designed a set of shared components and a full WYSIWYG builder that enabling brand owners to design their own section of Amazon. Launching in 2019, Brand Stores provided an end-to-end shopping experience that is wholly owned and created by a single brand. Customers could access brand’s Store from any of that brand’s product detail pages. In the first year over 250k Brands built and launched Stores on Amazon.

Show products in context to aid browsing and discovery: In customer research studies, Amazon customers consistently expressed that high-quality lifestyle imagery helped them make purchase decisions and trust unknown brands. In late 2019 our team took over ownership of Posts, a shopping experience driven by lifestyle images. Posts took advantage of the investment in Instagram advertising allowing Brands to reuse content they had created for their Instagram feeds and providing shoppers with a branching shopping experience in a familiar feed-based pattern.

Let customers directly influence what they see on Amazon: Leveraging technology built to enable customers to Follow favorite authors, we built and launched Brand Follow in 2020. By clicking the “Follow” button on branded content found across Amazon, customers send a signal to Amazon that they want to see more from their Followed brands in their Amazon shopping experience. Customers were enthusiastic about the ability to customize their Amazon experience providing ~50 million Brand Follow interactions in the first 6 months after launch.

Phase 2: Create a cohesive brand shopping journey

Mid 2020 to 2021 focused on building on the success of Brand Stores, Posts, and Brand Follow independently to build brand experiences across shopping stages and sessions.

To deliver this experience we built on the Brand Store as a hub for branded content and focused on creating shoppable moments in-line with the core Amazon shopping flow. Similarly, sponsored ads at the top of Search results or Video Ads on the Homepage were influenced by the brands a shopper Follows.

As Search is the most common ingress and browsing location for Amazon shoppers, we built componentized Shopping Pages for branded Searches. An example component are product collections that a brand builds in their Brand Store, but can then be populated directly in Search results.

Mockups in this section show brand collections across locations in the shopping journey as well as the expansion of brand experiences beyond shopping, such as Fire TV.

Phase 3: Package Components and help Brands Scale

Based on the success of our experiments on distributing Brand content through the shopping journey in 2020 we were faced with a demand for quality brand content that outpaced our supply. Through 2021 we worked with product and engineering to launch a series of Brand Building Blocks, reusable common components that could be built by brands in the Store and reused wholesale on other parts of Amazon.

Through the Stores Builder, our team created common brand components, such as a logo lockup or product category navigation, that we could store in a centralized CMS and deliver to new destinations across Amazon. The results is a more consistent presentation of brand content across Amazon and the ability for brands without a huge volume of content to still expand their footprint on Amazon.

The images in this section show live examples of Adidas product categories and collections as seen distributed across the Search and Brand Store locations.

To support this expansion of brand programs, we updated the Amazon Advertising console to show a brand’s reach and provide recommendations for additional investment.

Results

Across this multi-year initiative our team’s releases helped drive a surge in Amazon’s brand business through retail and advertising. A few standout stats from our work include:

100M unique Brand Follow engagements in the first year after launch.
Successful launch of Brand Shopping pages and Brand Logo in autocompleted Search - representing an increase of >33% in profit
Growth of the Brand Advertising business by >50% YoY 2020-2021

Team

UX Design & Writing:
Bronwyn Berkery, Genessa Massey, Heather Munafo, Dorothy Kong, Chantel Zapata Pray, Sneh Sharma

UX Research:
Seonaid Chappell, Karla Timmons

Product Managers:
Mike Blais, Gaurav Doshi, Harjot Grewal, Mili Doshi Patel

Press

Vogue highlights Amazon Luxury Stores for NY Fashion Week 2021

National Positions - Amazon Brand Follow

Amazon Ads - Advertiser Guide to Stores

Amazon Ads - Brand Stores Mobile

Amazon Brand Stores provide a unique home on Amazon that brands can build themselves using tools provided for free to all registered brands selling on Amazon.