So you have successfully tackled the world of Amazon selling but want to take it to the next level? Take the next logical step and open your own ecommerce store. Selling on Amazon is a great way to make sales, and opening your own online store will help boost your seller brand. Here is how to integrate ecommerce with your successful Amazon selling and how to leverage your existing customers when building out a store of your own.
1. Develop Your Brand
Firstly, you need to define and develop your brand. Branding is what sets you apart from other companies; a well-developed brand is essential for your personal ecommerce store as you transition from seller to brand.
- Branding is what defines your company. It tells your customers who you are and what you’re all about. If you haven’t already, take the time to develop your brand into something that truly represents the core values of your company.
- Keep branding consistent across your Amazon seller profile, your social media channels and your ecommerce store. This will make it easier to leverage existing customer relationships.
- Branding is your most valuable asset. Even if things don’t go the way you planned, there is more value in your branding then you realise. Defining and developing your brand at an early stage is beneficial for your business.
2. Design Your Website
Launching your own ecommerce store online needs a suitable platform outside of the comfort zone of the Amazon system. Going at it alone can feel scary at first, but there is plenty of support and guidance out there. There are many different options for creating your own ecommerce store:
- Designing your own website is a good option if you’ve got the skills. However, it can be pretty time consuming, and designing for ecommerce is a lot more technical than regular websites. Another option would be to pass it to a web designer who can use a custom CMS and build the store out for you.
- Alternatively, you can quickly build your own website using a hosted platform. With something like Shopify, you can open an online store quickly, and they integrate really well with Amazon. Soon you’ll even be able to list and sell your products on Amazon directly from Shopify.
- If you already run a successful blog or business website, you can see if your CMS offers an ecommerce add-on.
3. Leverage Marketplace Visibility
Amazon has an interest in boosting every sale merchants make as they get a small amount of commission on each product, but it can be hard to compete against other sellers (including Amazon itself). Now you are creating your own online store, you can leverage all those competitive experiences to help you build a sales-driven store.
- All the knowledge you’ve gained as an Amazon seller – use it to market your store. Analyse which sellers do well (and which ones don’t) and learn lessons from them in terms of copy, pricing and product-market fit. Analyse which sellers and products come up as recommendations around your listings and see whether you can offer what they do as well. Look at your own sales data and see what room you have for innovation and optimization in your new store. Here are some good ways to market your own store.
- Offer top quality or unique products, because this is how you get noticed – try to be the only one doing what you are doing to raise brand awareness. Make sure that you have great copy, product reviews and consistent branding on Amazon and that your new online store brings it all together with a great user-experience too
- You know that you can improve Amazon listings with these tips on product images – use this insight for your own store too. Great and detailed product imagery will help customers make informed decisions and will enliven your store.
- Because you are under the umbrella brand of Amazon, your products have already gained loyal customers. Use this customer trust to your advantage and listen to what they’ve been saying to you on Amazon and bring these insights into your new store.
4. Embrace Multichannel Selling
If you want to keep your Amazon marketplace store running in concurrence with your own online store, you’ve got the perfect opportunity to embrace being a multichannel merchant.
- Use different channels to your advantage in terms of stock management and pricing. Match different products with different channels and learn which promotions work best for which channel
- Provide a great customer experience across the board to encourage repeat custom. Be consistent and don’t let one channel down because you got distracted
- Develop strong brand touchpoints and go above and beyond during order fulfilment stage in order to offer real value to customers.
- Stay on top of your to-dos with project management software.
