Have a Successful Amazon Listing? Build a Brand Around It With Shopify

We’ll explain how to use branding to expand your customer base beyond Amazon. If you’re just starting out selling on Amazon, read this guide to learn how branding could actually increase traffic to your Amazon listing. 

Competition is tough

Amazon’s ecommerce platform embodies near perfect competition. Every product has at least dozens of direct competitors with identical features, descriptions, and feedback. There is only so much merchants can do to deliberately improve their listings: add A+ content, harness VINE reviews, add videos. Otherwise it’s a pricing race to the bottom or a patience game for positive feedback. The pricing winners are often either enormous established Amazon sellers with huge economies of scale or motivated manufacturers who produce massive quantities of a product and sell directly to consumers. These two players are impossible for emerging merchants to compete with without accepting net negative margins.

If you do have a successful Amazon listing, consider yourself lucky. 

If you don’t yet have a successful Amazon listing, consider other means to set yourself apart from the crowd.

Use platforms like Shopify to build your brand digitally

Amazon gives merchants very little control of their digital brand. If your customer base exists solely on Amazon, you likely have little to no demographics insight or customer contact access. Amazon provides very limited demographic data and absolutely no customer contact information like phone numbers or emails. They own your customer base, not you.

In exchange for a spot on the biggest ecommerce website on Earth, you relinquish access to your own customers.

Platforms like Shopify give you all the tools you need to build your digital brand, not only providing tons of features and third party apps to design, market, and sell, but also allowing you to interact directly with your customer base through any means you choose. Shopify has no interest in owning your customers.

What is a brand?

A brand is the way customers think, feel, and talk about your company. It can be a trend, a movement, or a culture. 

What do you think about when you hear these company names? Nike. Gucci. Starbucks. These brands are worth billions of dollars, not because they searched endlessly for the perfect unique product, but because they have spent copious amounts of energy building a perception of their product. Sneakers, leather purses, and coffee. Search for those products on Amazon and see how many listings you see. You could permanently delete every single one of Nike’s Amazon listings without making a dent in their valuation. Why? Because you could make a new Nike listing with a different shoe the next day and sell just as many shoes as before.

So how valuable is your Amazon listing really without a brand behind it? What are you going to do when Amazon makes an identical, yet soleless Amazon Basics version of the same product?

Use your cash flow to build a brand

If you do happen to have successful Amazon listings with positive cash flow, invest in your brand. It’s probably a lot less expensive and a little more enjoyable than your standard Amazon PPC campaign. 

If you are trying to create a successful Amazon listing, the problem might not be the product, but the audience. They don’t know who you are and they will feel no different buying your $11.90 plastic lump than your competitor’s $11.95 plastic lump. It was just the logical thing to do.

Get the audience on your side by taking your product directly to them in an environment outside the concrete ecommerce shopping cart that is Amazon.

Why use a platform like Shopify for branding?

Whatever digital marketing campaign you launch, whether it is an Instagram ad, a Tik Tok affiliate video, or a blog, a tool like Shopify will give you valuable conversion metrics and customer contacts. You can use this data to build lookalike audiences or retarget customers through email campaigns. Beyond that, Shopify has a host of branding, marketing, and conversion tools to help you build your customer base and take ownership of your marketing.

Branding will make your Amazon listing even better

Building your brand outside of Amazon through other digital platforms will inevitably increase your click-through rates, searches, and conversions on Amazon.

Everyone is on Amazon, but it doesn’t mean you have to start there. You might not capture everyone in your target audience with a platform like Shopify. Today’s consumer is habituated to buying on Amazon and might prefer their hassle-free returns and all-in-one shopping experience. But once you have access to some audience members, more like them will come through word of mouth and other marketing means. When people know who you are and why they should buy your stuff, they’ll stop searching for “plastic lump” on Amazon. Instead they’ll search for “[your brand] plastic lump.”

How do I do it?

Moving your digital brand presence outside of Amazon is easy. Shopify is a very user-friendly and modern platform used by top brands globally.

If you have Amazon inventory and use FBA, you can easily route orders from Shopify to Amazon FBA using Amazon FBA Multi-Channel Fulfillment.