At the Accelerate 2021 conference, Amazon revealed that more than 100k brands started selling on Amazon in the US so far this year. Sales by brands are up 60% year over year for the 12-month period ending the 30th of June.
Amazon connects brands with hundreds of millions of customers worldwide, offering brands a wide range of tools and services to help drive their success. At the event, the company announced a range of new tools, services, and benefits to help brands build and maintain customer relationships and increase their sales and profitability.
“We want Amazon to be the best place for brands of all types and sizes to succeed, and we’re dedicated to helping them share their story and products to customers around the globe. We are constantly innovating for brands and excited to share some of our latest tools, services, and other benefits including the Amazon Brand Referral Bonus, Amazon Customer Engagement tool, A+ Story Cards, and Customer Review Resolution tool.”
– Ian Simpson, Vice President of Selling Partner Tools and Services, Amazon
New tools, services, and benefits for brands selling on Amazon
- The Amazon Brand Referral Bonus, which helps brands make their marketing dollars go further. When brands direct non-Amazon marketing traffic from their own website or other websites to Amazon, they earn a bonus of, on average, 10% of the purchase price of the promoted product and any of the brand’s other products that the customer purchases over the following two weeks. Thousands of brands are already taking advantage of this benefit, with some earning thousands of dollars in bonuses in a single month.
- The Amazon Customer Engagement tool, which enables brands to easily launch email marketing campaigns to raise awareness of new products. Since launching the beta version of the tool in May, Amazon has already sent more than 6 million emails to customers on behalf of brands.
- A+ Story Cards on the product page enable brands to showcase their brand story through rich visual imagery and more seamlessly connect shoppers with their other products. In the last month, brands have enabled A+ Story Cards on more than 1 million products.
- The Customer Review Resolution tool, which enables brands to provide enhanced customer service when they identify a frustrated customer who leaves a negative product review. The tool enables brands to proactively offer additional support and a courtesy refund if a customer is unhappy with the product and leaves a negative review; this helps them build a stronger connection to their customers. Since the tool’s launch in June, brands have already offered enhanced support on more than 200,000 orders per month.
In addition to these new features, Amazon offers a range of free tools, services, and benefits for brands to help them launch their brand, build customer relationships, and grow and succeed, including:
- Amazon Stores empowers brands to create a customisable multipage storefront that tells their brand story and lets Amazon customers both learn about their company and discover their full range of products. Brands selling on Amazon.com have launched more than 140,000 stores.
- Brand Follow lets customers indicate their interest in a specific brand and receive updates about new products and promotions. Customers who “Follow” a brand in Amazon’s store on average spend more than double on products from the brand than other shoppers not following the brand.
- Manage Your Experiments lets brands run A/B tests on their product listings to help them better understand which product information appeals to Amazon customers, ultimately driving more sales. To date in 2021, brands have used Manage Your Experiments to create tens of thousands of experiments to improve the quality of their listings, which have increased their sales by up to 25%.
- Virtual Bundles gives brands the opportunity to offer two to five complementary products as a bundle without needing to pack the items together before sending them to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. By offering a virtual bundle, brands can increase their basket size, resulting in an over 15% sales lift for bundled products on average.
- Posts helps brands drive discovery on Amazon using images and lifestyle content that are displayed across Amazon and link to relevant Amazon product pages. Posts are free and available for brands selling in Amazon’s U.S. store. In the last year, Amazon delivered more than 11 billion viewable impressions through Posts.
- A+ Content helps brands better showcase their story and product features with immersive rich content such as videos, images, and dynamic text on their Amazon product detail pages. A+ Content helps increase conversion rates, and in 2021 alone, brands have added A+ Content to over 1 million product pages globally.
These features are available to all brands enrolled in Brand Registry and selling in Amazon’s US store, except for the Amazon Customer Engagement tool, which will continue to be tested in a beta version throughout early 2022.
