For nearly a decade, well-known brands selling on Amazon had a very important advantage over their smaller rivals: access to enhanced A+ content. But over the past year, that advantage went away, as Amazon gave select third-party sellers the ability to enhance their product pages.
Here’s an overview of the new seller content that has appeared on Amazon during 2015.
Amazon Launchpad: Image-Rich Content
Branded seller product pages can be found at Amazon Launchpad, a service which showcases products backed by crowdfunding or venture capital. Launchpad started in July in the US and expanded to the UK in November.
Launchpad content modules look nothing like those available to Amazon vendors. The typical layout is as follows:
- Module 1: About the product
- Module 2: Brand video or brand banner
- Module 3: Text with left-aligned image
- Module 4: Text with right-aligned image
- Module 5: 3 columns with images “inspiration text”
- Module 6: Banner image
- Module 7: About the startup
Amazon provides Launchpad sellers with a template for creating content. They fill it out, send it to Amazon, and an Amazon team builds the pages.
Amazon Vendor Express: Vendor “Lite” Content
In March of 2015, Amazon launched Vendor Express. The service makes it easier for boutique upstarts to have their products show up marked as “ships from and sold by Amazon.com.”
Vendor Express product pages look the same as those available to Amazon vendors, with a couple of key differences. First, several of the more advanced modules are not available. Secondly, there’s no self-service option. Vendor Express sellers submit content using a Microsoft Word template and a team at Amazon builds it.
Amazon Exclusives: The Wild West of Content
Amazon Exclusives launched in March of 2015 as a way to give shoppers access to “up and coming products” that they won’t find anywhere else. Product pages on Amazon Exclusives frequently feature full-width banners and text with side-by-side images.
Here are three Amazon Exclusives page examples:
Amazon Vendors Still Winning Content War
So does this new Seller Central content mean Amazon has given smaller brands the content tools to compete with big brands? We don’t think so.
Sellers still can’t create strategic content because they don’t have access to Amazon Vendor Central. Assuming they have a well-thought-out content strategy, big brands can use Amazon Vendor Central content creation tools to create content that can be strategically refreshed and optimized for search.
We don’t work with Amazon Sellers, but I’ve heard from other folks that the Amazon-Builds-It process is cumbersome and expensive. Our advice to Amazon Vendors is to keep ahead of the competition in the new year by creating strategic content. More on that tomorrow!
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