Amazon Vendor Central Brand Store

TL;DR — Key takeaways

Amazon Brand Stores are free for both Vendor Central and Seller Central accounts enrolled in Brand Registry — but VC vendors access the Store Builder through advertising.amazon.com, not the VC dashboard.
Optimized Brand Stores drive a 35% increase in attributed sales per visitor (Amazon Ads internal data, 2024).
Premium store design generates 31% higher New-to-Brand sales vs basic templates — NTB acquisition is the metric that proves long-term brand equity on Amazon.
Interactive modules boost Time on Store by 42%; dynamic widgets (Best Sellers, Recommended for You) raise average order value by 18%.
Brands that activate their store within 60 days of VC onboarding see a 2.3x higher NTB acquisition rate in months 3–6, based on Epinium’s own managed-account data.

You’ve just signed your Vendor Central agreement. Amazon is now your first-party retail partner. You’re excited to build a Brand Store — a proper storefront, your URL, your creative, your customer journey. So you log into Vendor Central, click around every menu, and find… nothing. No “Brand Store.” No “Store Builder.” The feature simply does not exist inside the VC dashboard. Cue 45 minutes of support tickets and confused Slack messages to your agency.

This is the single most common onboarding frustration we hear from brand managers and marketing directors at manufacturers new to Vendor Central. And it matters, because the window you lose while searching for a tool that isn’t where you expect it is a window your competitors use to capture your own customers.

What a Brand Store Actually Is — and What It Isn’t

Amazon Brand Stores are multi-page, fully customizable storefronts hosted at amazon.com/brandname. They’re free. They carry no per-click cost and no listing fee. Any brand enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry — whether selling via Vendor Central, Seller Central, or both — is eligible to build one.

That last point trips people up. Brand Stores are not a Vendor Central feature. They’re not a Seller Central feature either. They belong to Amazon Brand Registry, which sits above both selling programs. This means access, creation, and management all flow through the Amazon Advertising console at advertising.amazon.com — not through Vendor Central’s supply-chain-oriented dashboard, which exists to manage purchase orders, pricing, and inventory, not brand marketing surfaces.

Once you’re inside the Advertising console, look for Stores in the left navigation. That’s your entry point. From there, the Store Builder gives you a drag-and-drop, tile-based editor with three core template starting points:

Marquee — hero video or image up top, best for brand-forward campaigns and seasonal pushes.
Product Grid — catalog-focused layout, ideal when breadth of range is the story.
Store Spotlight — three featured items or categories, best for focused product launches.

After you publish, Amazon’s moderation team reviews the store — typically within 24 hours. Once approved, your store is live and your branded URL is active.

What a Brand Store is not: it’s not the auto-generated “Amazon Storefront” that every seller gets by default, which has no customization and no dedicated URL. And it’s not a replacement for your DTC website, though it functions as your owned brand environment within Amazon’s ecosystem. Think of it as a landing page infrastructure that lives where your buyers already are.

Setup: Step-by-Step for Vendor Central Brands

The setup process is straightforward once you’re in the right place. Here’s the exact path:

Step 1 — Confirm Brand Registry enrollment. Go to brandservices.amazon.com and verify your brand is enrolled. Your trademark must be registered (or pending in an eligible IP Accelerator program). Without Brand Registry, the Stores tab won’t appear in the Advertising console.

Step 2 — Connect your Vendor Central account to your Brand Registry account. In Brand Registry, under “Manage,” add your Vendor Central selling account as a connected account. This is the bridge that grants the Advertising console access to your brand assets and gives Store Builder the ability to pull your ASIN catalog.

Step 3 — Open the Advertising console. Log in at advertising.amazon.com using the credentials associated with your Brand Registry account (not necessarily your VC login — this is another point of confusion). Navigate to Brand Content → Stores → Create Store.

Step 4 — Build your store architecture. Plan your pages before you touch the builder. A well-structured store has a homepage, 3–5 category or sub-brand pages, and optionally a “New Arrivals” or “Best Sellers” page. Flat architecture (2–3 levels max) keeps mobile navigation usable.

Step 5 — Add tiles and modules. The builder uses a tile system. Prioritize video tiles, product collection tiles with dynamic widgets, and rich text tiles over static image-only layouts. We’ll cover why shortly.

Step 6 — Submit for moderation. Hit “Submit for Publishing.” Moderation takes approximately 24 hours. You’ll receive an email confirmation when the store goes live.

One overlooked step: set up the Store Insights dashboard from day one. It’s your attribution tool. Without it, you have no idea whether your Sponsored Brands campaigns are actually converting inside the store or bouncing out.

Design That Performs: What the Data Actually Says

Most Brand Stores look fine. Few convert well. The gap between “fine” and “high-performing” is measurable and repeatable.

According to Amazon Ads internal data from 2024, brands with optimized stores see a 35% increase in attributed sales per visitor compared to brands with bare-bones implementations. That is not a marginal improvement. That’s the difference between a store that justifies its existence and one that’s burning Sponsored Brands budget on a dead end.

35%

sales lift per visitor for brands with optimized Brand Stores

Source: Amazon Ads internal data, 2024

The design choices that drive that number are specific. Frooition’s 2026 Amazon Brand Store Design Guide documents a 42% engagement boost in Time on Store when brands use interactive modules (video tiles, shoppable image tiles, Best Sellers carousels) versus static image-only layouts. The same analysis found an 18% higher average order value tied to dynamic widgets — specifically the “Recommended for You” and “Best Seller” tiles that personalize the shopper experience.

Premium design versus basic templates shows up in NTB data too: brands with thoughtfully structured stores achieve 31% higher New-to-Brand sales rates. For Vendor Central brands — whose primary Amazon objective is usually category leadership and awareness, not just transaction volume — NTB is the number that should be on every monthly report.

Here’s the contrarian take most agencies won’t give you: a beautifully designed Brand Store that sends traffic to poorly optimized product detail pages is still a failure. The store is the top of your Amazon conversion funnel. If your PDPs have weak copy, missing A+ Content, or incomplete catalog data, the Brand Store only accelerates the leak. What we see at Epinium is that brands invest heavily in store creative and then underinvest in the underlying catalog that the store points to. Fix both, or fix the PDPs first. The store amplifies what’s already there — good or bad.

On mobile: 70% of Amazon shoppers browse on mobile devices. Every design decision — tile stacking order, image crop, video aspect ratio, navigation depth — must be validated in the mobile preview before publishing. A tile layout that looks balanced on desktop can collapse into a confusing vertical wall on a 390px screen. And performance matters: a 1-second page load delay correlates with a 7% drop in conversion rate. Heavy uncompressed video files are the most common cause. Keep hero videos under 100MB and use Amazon’s recommended MP4 specs.

Refresh cadence is underrated. Brands that update store creative on a 90-day cycle see 21% higher repeat purchase rates versus brands that set the store once and forget it. Seasonal relevance signals that a brand is active, curated, and worth following — which matters as Amazon’s “Brand Follow” feature becomes a more meaningful distribution channel.

Traffic Strategy: Getting Shoppers Into the Store

An unpromoted Brand Store gets organic traffic primarily from two sources: shoppers who click the brand name link on a product detail page, and shoppers who already know your Amazon URL. That’s not enough to build a meaningful business on.

The primary paid traffic driver for Brand Stores is Sponsored Brands campaigns. These appear at the top of search results and can link directly to a custom page inside your store — not just the homepage. Sending Sponsored Brands traffic to a dedicated “Summer Collection” page inside your store rather than your homepage increases relevance, which improves conversion and Quality Score. If you’re not familiar with how Sponsored Brands costs scale, this breakdown of Amazon advertising costs is a useful reference point before you set budgets.

What we see at Epinium is that most Vendor Central brands run Sponsored Brands to their store homepage by default and never test deep-linked sub-pages. That’s an immediate optimization to test — and it costs nothing extra, just a campaign duplication and URL swap.

Beyond Sponsored Brands: Amazon Posts (short-form social content that appears on PDPs and category feeds) now carries Store attribution, meaning Post engagement can be tracked back to Store traffic. Amazon Live — shoppable streaming video — drives viewers directly to a store page. Both are free formats that generate traffic with no incremental media spend. The brands using Posts consistently are building a remarketing audience inside Amazon’s ecosystem without paying per click for every impression.

External traffic — from Meta, TikTok, Google, or email — sent to your Brand Store URL qualifies for Amazon’s Brand Referral Bonus program (for Seller Central brands) and for attribution modeling in Amazon Attribution (available to both SC and VC). For Vendor Central brands driving off-Amazon traffic, this is a genuine competitive advantage: you capture the sale on Amazon, track the source, and build the attribution data that justifies external ad spend.

Epinium data

Across the Vendor Central accounts we manage, brands that activate a Brand Store within the first 60 days of onboarding see a 2.3x higher New-to-Brand acquisition rate in months 3–6 compared to brands that delay or skip the store entirely. Speed of activation matters more than most brands expect — the compounding effect on NTB starts early and is hard to catch up on later.

Brand Store vs Other Amazon and Off-Amazon Surfaces

Feature	Brand Store (VC)	Brand Store (SC)	Basic Amazon Storefront	DTC Website
Who can use it	VC brands enrolled in Brand Registry	SC brands enrolled in Brand Registry	All Amazon sellers (auto-generated)	Any brand with their own domain
Cost	Free	Free	Free (no control)	Platform + dev costs
Customization	Full (multi-page, video, tiles)	Full (same builder)	None	Complete
Branded URL	amazon.com/brandname	amazon.com/brandname	No dedicated URL	yourbrand.com
Access path	Advertising console (not VC dashboard)	Advertising console	Automatic	Your CMS / dev team
Sponsored Brands linkable	Yes	Yes	No	Via Amazon Attribution
Store Insights / analytics	Yes (within Advertising console)	Yes	No	Full (GA4, etc.)
Catalog sync	Pulls from VC ASIN catalog	Pulls from SC listings	Auto (no selection)	Manual / API

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✓ Store architecture review (pages, tiles, navigation depth)
✓ Traffic source analysis (Sponsored Brands deep-link vs homepage)
✓ Mobile UX assessment
✓ NTB and Store Insights benchmarking

What Changed in 2025–2026

The Brand Store product has evolved substantially in the past 18 months. If your understanding of Store Builder is based on documentation from 2023 or earlier, several core assumptions are now outdated.

AI-Assisted Store Builder

Amazon introduced AI-powered layout suggestions inside the Store Builder in late 2024, now widely rolled out across regions in 2025. The feature analyzes your ASIN catalog, existing A+ Content, and Brand Registry assets to propose page structures and tile placements. It doesn’t replace creative judgment — the suggestions are often too conservative — but it dramatically reduces the time to first draft for brands setting up their first store or rebuilding after a major catalog expansion. Think of it as an opinionated starting point, not a finished product.

Amazon Live Integration

Amazon Live streams can now be embedded directly inside Brand Store pages as a native tile type, not just linked externally. This matters for Vendor Central brands in categories where demonstration drives purchase intent — home goods, kitchen, fitness, beauty. A live stream tile keeps shoppers inside your brand environment instead of redirecting them to a separate Live product page. For brands already investing in video content, this is a zero-cost distribution upgrade. For brands not yet doing Live, it’s worth evaluating: the barrier to entry is lower than most assume, and the shoppability is built in.

Posts → Store Attribution Updates

Amazon Posts now carry explicit Store attribution in the Advertising console’s Stores Insights dashboard. Previously, Posts traffic that landed inside a Brand Store was often lumped into “other” traffic sources, making it nearly impossible to attribute correctly. The 2025 attribution update lets brand managers see Posts as a distinct traffic channel, measure Time on Store from Posts visitors separately, and tie Post-driven sessions to attributed sales. This makes the ROI case for a consistent Posts cadence far cleaner to defend internally — which is why we’re now seeing more VC brands fund a regular Posts schedule as a budget line item rather than treating it as a discretionary marketing experiment.

Brand Follow Metric Visibility

The Brand Follow feature — which lets shoppers follow a brand and receive notifications about new products, deals, and Posts — now has dedicated reporting inside the Stores dashboard. Follow count, Follow rate, and follower-attributed traffic are visible metrics as of early 2026. This is significant because Brand Follows represent the closest thing Amazon offers to a first-party audience: shoppers who have explicitly opted in to brand communications. What we see at Epinium is that brands with optimized stores accumulate followers roughly 3x faster than brands with template-only implementations, because a rich store gives browsers a reason to follow rather than just transact and leave.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a Vendor Central brand access the Brand Store builder?

Through the Amazon Advertising console at advertising.amazon.com — not through the Vendor Central dashboard. This is the most common point of confusion. Your Brand Registry account must be connected to your VC selling account. Once connected, log into the Advertising console (using your Brand Registry credentials), and navigate to Brand Content → Stores. The Store Builder will appear there. If you don’t see it, the most likely cause is an incomplete Brand Registry connection or a permissions issue on the Advertising console user account.

Do I need a separate Amazon Advertising account from my Vendor Central account?

Yes, they are separate accounts. Vendor Central manages your supply-chain relationship with Amazon as a retail partner. Amazon Advertising is a distinct platform where you run campaigns and access brand content tools including the Store Builder. In practice, most VC brands either link existing Advertising accounts or create new ones. If you’re working with an agency, they can be granted access to the Advertising console separately from your VC credentials — and this is usually the cleaner setup, since VC login credentials carry more sensitive access rights.

Can I have a Brand Store without selling products directly on Amazon myself?

Technically, no — Brand Registry enrollment requires an active selling account (either VC or SC) in the relevant marketplace. However, there are edge cases: a brand that manufactures and sells exclusively through a VC relationship (meaning Amazon itself holds the inventory and sells it) does have an active selling relationship, just one where Amazon is the retailer. What you cannot do is build a Brand Store with Brand Registry enrollment alone, without any corresponding selling account. The catalog that populates your store tiles must come from real ASINs connected to your account.

What happens to my Brand Store if I lose Brand Registry?

Your store will be deactivated and become inaccessible to shoppers. The URL (amazon.com/brandname) will stop resolving to your store content. Store Insights data is retained in the Advertising console for a period, but the live store is suspended. This is one reason why Brand Registry maintenance — keeping trademark registrations current, monitoring for infringement issues that could affect Brand Registry standing — is not just an IP management concern but a retail operations concern. Losing Brand Registry mid-peak-season because of a lapsed trademark renewal is a recoverable but painful situation we’ve seen firsthand.

How do I know if my Brand Store is driving sales vs just capturing organic product discovery?

The Store Insights dashboard inside the Advertising console breaks down traffic sources: Sponsored Brands, tag-attributed traffic (Amazon Attribution tags on external links), organic/direct, and Posts. Attributed sales in Store Insights are calculated on a 14-day attribution window by default. The key diagnostic question is whether your Sponsored Brands campaigns are set to deep-link to specific store pages or to the homepage — because deep-linked campaigns have a direct, traceable path from ad impression to store session to purchase, while organic discovery is harder to attribute cleanly. If your Store Insights show high sessions but low attributed sales, the most common causes are: traffic going to the wrong page (homepage vs relevant sub-page), or store pages pointing to PDPs with weak conversion rates.

Does the Brand Store affect my organic search ranking inside Amazon?

Not directly, in the sense that having a store doesn’t boost a product’s A9 rank on its own. However, Brand Stores do contribute indirectly: traffic driven to the store that converts into purchases sends positive sales velocity signals on those ASINs, which does influence organic rank. Additionally, Sponsored Brands campaigns that link to stores benefit from relevance signals that feed back into campaign quality. And well-optimized catalog data — the foundation of your store’s product tiles — reinforces the keyword relevance that Amazon’s algorithm uses for organic ranking. The store and the catalog work together. Treating them as separate workstreams is a mistake.

How often should I update my Brand Store creative?

At minimum, every 90 days — based on the data showing 21% higher repeat purchase rates for brands on that refresh cadence. In practice, the most effective cadence is event-driven: update when you launch a new product line, when a major seasonal window opens (Q4, Prime Day), and when you have new video assets worth featuring. The moderation turnaround is approximately 24 hours, so planning creative updates a few days before a campaign launch is sufficient. What you want to avoid is the store sitting with creative from a previous season while your Sponsored Brands campaigns are running — the mismatch between ad creative and store landing page is a conversion killer.

Can I run A/B tests on my Brand Store?

Amazon offers a native A/B testing feature for Brand Stores, called “Manage Experiments,” available to Vendor Central and Seller Central brands with sufficient traffic volume. You can test different homepage versions against each other, with Amazon splitting traffic and reporting which version drives higher attributed sales and engagement. The minimum traffic threshold to get statistically meaningful results is relatively high, which means smaller brands or stores with limited Sponsored Brands spend may not qualify for formal experiments. In that case, running sequential tests (version A for 4 weeks, version B for 4 weeks, same ad spend) is a practical alternative — less clean statistically, but far better than never testing at all.

What’s the most common design mistake Vendor Central brands make with their Brand Store?

Building a catalog dump instead of a brand narrative. The Store Builder makes it very easy to drop every ASIN into a product grid and call it done. What that produces is an experience indistinguishable from a category search results page — which is exactly what shoppers were already browsing before they clicked into your store. A high-performing Brand Store tells a story: why this brand, why these products, why now. That means leading with video or a hero image that communicates brand identity, not just product photography. It means organizing sub-pages around use cases or customer types, not just SKU categories. And it means writing store copy that earns attention, not just captions that describe features. The brands that treat the store like a microsite — with intention behind every page — consistently outperform the brands that treat it like a product directory.

Is there a minimum ad spend required to build or maintain a Brand Store?

No. Brand Stores are free to build and maintain regardless of whether you’re running any Sponsored Brands campaigns. You can have an active, published Brand Store with zero concurrent ad spend. That said, a store with no traffic driver will generate very little business impact. Organic discovery through PDP brand links is valuable, but it’s not scalable on its own. In practice, a Brand Store without at least some Sponsored Brands budget attached to it is a bit like a well-designed website with no SEO or paid traffic — technically functional, but underutilized.

The brands that get the most from their Vendor Central Brand Store are the ones that treat it as a living channel, not a one-time setup task. They connect it to their campaign architecture, refresh it on a quarterly cycle, track the metrics that matter (NTB, Time on Store, attributed sales per visitor), and invest in the underlying catalog quality that determines whether store traffic converts. The store itself is free. What it costs is attention — and attention is where most VC brands underinvest.

If Brand Registry enrollment, advertising console access, and 90-day creative cycles sound like a lot to manage on top of everything else that comes with a Vendor Central relationship, that’s because they are. The brands that treat Brand Stores as a set-and-forget feature will find the data confirming exactly that. The brands that treat it as an active brand channel — one of the few places on Amazon where you control the narrative — will find a different story in their NTB numbers six months from now.

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