How fashion houses can embrace marketplaces without weakening their brand

Recent developments to Amazon’s platform means there is more opportunity than ever before for fashion houses to control and customise the way they showcase their clothing lines on Amazon.

When you think of brand stores on Amazon, what do you think of? White space? The usual orange and grey logos? Rows and rows of products without much identity?

Or do you see a blank canvas?

Unfortunately, the majority of brands would answer with the former. To them, Amazon may well be an effective channel for reaching new audiences, but it’s not one which they can control. Naturally, this is more of a concern for fashion houses, where consistent branding and strong visuals are crucial to sales.

But, while Amazon certainly has its own rules and formats that you must follow, there is more customisation available to brands than you may initially think. Here are some of my top tips for how fashion houses can embrace Amazon without weakening their brand.

Top of the class

The quickest way to integrate your brand within the Amazon platform is to populate your product listing pages with what Amazon likes to call ‘A+ Content’. Custom images, videos, key selling points and product descriptions can all be uploaded to give your products a unique brand feel.

This does more than just make your listing look pretty; it allows you to tell your brand story and position products in a way which you know resonates with audiences.

Effective A+ content therefore has the power to significantly improve conversion rates, traffic and sales. With enhanced product descriptions and unique product features, you can help customers make the right buying decisions by proactively answering their questions.

Get the balance right

Get creative with your content, but remember that Amazon is still a marketplace and that customers use it as such. It may be tempting to use a frilly title for a product, but are people really going to search for it? Success here is therefore a balancing act between ensuring your products are searchable on Amazon, while also making them stand out from the crowd.

The good news is, this isn’t particularly tricky to do. It just requires a bit of attention to detail. By scattering key search terms throughout your product titles and descriptions, you can maximise your organic reach while still keeping your page looking the way you want it to look. For instance:

“Beautifully bold skirt”…

… sounds lovely, but doesn’t really tell you much about the product.

“Beautifully bold skater skirt”…

… is better, but there’s still something missing.

“Beautifully bold summer skater skirt”…

… automatically captures three key search terms while still conveying the kind of personality that makes your brand tick.

Consistency is key

There are creative limits to how far you can push your brand store on Amazon, but that doesn’t mean it can’t look ‘on-brand’. There are plenty of great examples of fashion houses that use lifestyle imagery, model shots and brand videos (all complying with Amazon’s brand store format) to maintain the look and feel of their own website within Amazon’s platform.

Again, this does more than just make the store look nice.

There still seems to be a perception amongst the general public that, if they find a certain brand’s product on Amazon or eBay, then it’s not actually going to be ‘the real thing’. But if your Amazon store is on brand, then it reassures the customer that they’re purchasing genuine products from a brand they know and who they’ve purchased from before – they’re just doing it through a different channel/platform.

No more copy cats

One of the most useful benefits of registering your brand or trademark with Amazon is the extra power it gives you to control resellers. If you come across a reseller, or someone who is trying to copy your brand’s look and feel for their own benefit, then you can actually flag that with Amazon and get those products taken down.

Even if your trademark hasn’t been totally violated, you can still control the way your products look on Amazon by merging product pages together. That way, your product information (and its associated A+ Content) stays at the forefront, with those resellers forced to run in the background instead.

And finally, get it right from the start

Once you’ve uploaded a product to your store, Amazon will be particularly resistant to any major changes you may want to make in the future. Often, you have to open a load of seller support conversations just to solve what should be a fairly simple issue. In the worst case scenario, you’ll simply have to get rid of whatever you originally uploaded and start from scratch.

The moral of the story? Don’t do your brand the disservice of doing a slapdash job halfway down the road.

Get it right from the start, and the rest will follow.