We are excited to recap several announcements since last month including new features, Webstore developer news and new Seller highlights! If you are part of the Amazon Webstore community as a Seller, developer, Solution Provider, or business owner looking to build an ecommerce presence, this is your guide to staying on top of the latest we have to offer.
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News & Announcements
To keep you up-to-date, we bring you some exciting news items and product announcements from Amazon Webstore to help expand your community, build customer loyalty and drive traffic and conversion – improved setup process, industry-specific storefronts, new design templates and theme customization, and updated store design.
Improved Setup Process: When you register for Webstore as a new Seller you will benefit from an updated, task-oriented interface in Seller Central that guides you through the Webstore site design and listing tools. Combined with Webstore’s new best-practice default sites, the improved setup workflow helps you launch a professional looking site quickly. Workflow steps include selecting a site theme, creating product categories, adding products, customizing the store design, and editing store settings. During the setup process, you will be able to view getting started tutorials, and find enhanced help content helping you quickly launch a ‘sale ready’ site. To find out more about Webstore and to register, visit webstore.amazon.com.
Industry-Specific Storefronts: We are happy to announce the release of three industry-specific storefronts and an optimized generic storefront. Starting with high quality, industry-specific templates enables you to launch a great website with less effort. When you register as a new seller, with a primary sales channel in apparel, jewelry & watches or consumer electronics, you get a default template, including a pre-selected visual theme, best practice widget placements, default category structure, content pages, and industry-relevant imagery. All default content is customizable utilizing Webstore toolsets, including an updated site merchandising tool, an updated getting started guide, and help content guide. Default templates can help you benefit from Amazon’s sixteen years of ecommerce experience and quickly launch a compelling, converting, customized ‘sale ready’ site. Learn more about working with default content.
New Design Templates & Theme Customization: Webstore now has a richer theme experience that enables you to choose from a wider variety of website designs, and further customize the look of your Webstore through the use of a new site-wide customization tool. This release adds five new high-quality themes, each with three color variations. These themes are available in an updated theme selection interface which provides larger images and increased visibility into the attributes of each theme. You can choose to preview and select a theme for your Webstore, or customize a theme to further refine your site design.
The customization interface allows you to perform common site-wide design tasks, even if you have limited coding experience. Customize colors, background images, logos, and text display in an easy-to-use tool which applies changes across your Webstore. Once you customize a theme, you can save that configuration for use at any time. Through the theme selection interface, you can return to both the default as well as customized themes, switching the look and feel of your site as often as you wish. This allows you to assemble a library of seasonal site designs which you can change at will. Learn more about working with themes.
Updated Store Design & Merchandising Interface: Webstore’s Merchanding & Layout tool allows you to assemble rich merchandising vignettes utilizing your own imagery and text, with limited technical knowledge. Place your own imagery and text overlays in layouts and link them to category or product detail pages to quickly create a highly customized merchandising experience. Coupled with video tutorials and enhanced help content, the new merchandising tool will allow you to confidently create a ‘sale ready’ site.
The updated Merchandising & Layout page in Seller Central includes a new site navigation pane that provides easy access to the hierarchy of customizable Webstore pages, and a clear separation between site design and site merchandising functions. The workspace real estate has been de-cluttered by collapsing the Seller Central navigation bar, and providing floating dialogs for editing widget properties. Unused layout slots are hidden by default, providing a WYSIWYG view of the page, while still allowing flexibility in adding, removing and repositioning widgets. Additionally, you can toggle slot display to “on” for finer control. Learn more about merchandising on Webstore or the site merchandising process.
Webstore Developer News
Read below to learn more about some of our advanced Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and innovative initiatives.
Externalization APIs, Build Your Own Features: Webstore’s set of buyer-facing discovery APIs include: product, search, cart, and a cart transition (interstitial) page from external discovery applications to website purchase. Webstore’s buyer-facing API allows you to customize and extend the Webstore storefront website experience. The Webstore API can be used to enable iPhone/Android apps, video links (Overlay TV), storefront flash widgets, gift finders, product comparators, Facebook apps, and Deal of the Day apps. Our most successful sellers leverage our Solution Provider network (e.g., Atmosphere Solutions, eFashion Solutions, etc.) to implement our buyer facing APIs with businesses like Secondipity, Karen Millen and Expo Marker.
- Secondipity (Dyscern) launched their “Deal of the Day” (DotD) website. The site utilizes product and cart APIs to pull specific product information to their home page and a specialized DotD browse page.
- Karen Millen launched their website with a Catwalk feature. This feature is a specialized discovery flash application that utilizes product and cart APIs.
- Expo Markers (Rubbermaid) launched with a simulated “bundle” product. A bundle is sold as a single product with one price but made up of multiple individual products and utilizes the product and cart APIs.
To find out more about this feature, contact us or one of our solution providers for more information.
Expanded Product Type Support: We have been hard at work making improvements to the Catalog Manager tool by expanding product support to cover the vast majority of all product types, and introducing new templates for creating and updating products via bulk upload. This new release adds support for over 150 additional products types in the US and UK. This brings the total number of supported product types to 223, covering 99.5% of all ASINs (Amazon products) currently listed on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. The additional product types enables you to use Webstore’s Catalog Manager to manage listings in both the Webstore and Selling on Amazon sales channels.
The expanded product type support also introduces bulk upload (.csv) templates for the following new product categories: books, music, pc, shoes, beauty, baby products, pet products, grocery, gourmet, software, wireless, lawn and garden. Additionally, consumer electronics, jewelry and apparel templates were enhanced to include embedded instructions, data dictionaries, guidance on valid values, and examples. Learn more about supported product types.
Use Webstore Templating Language to Access Server Side Scripting: Webstore’s templating language is the newest enhancement in Webstore’s suite of developer tools, offering both a SaaS solution that leverages Amazon’s industry-leading performance, reliability and scalability, coupled with externalization capabilities providing hooks into key components of the platform for easy customization. Access to server side scripting allows you to customize the Webstore ecommerce platform.
As a developer, you now have access to the source code for selected pages and widgets through any WebDAV client. Through a WebDAV client, you can download and edit the code in the WebDAV-enabled development tool of choice, and then upload the new scripts back into Webstore. Webstore now supports Dreamweaver integration and Dreamweaver’s WebDAV features.
This first release of WebStore templating language provides server side scripting support for the following components:
- Product Detail Page – Customize product detail to create a unique product detail page layout based on any product attribute.
- Search Refinements – Customize the display of the search refinements and search filters based on your business need, to include items such as a slider or multi-select.
- Search Results Widget and Page – Custom scripting for the search results widget allows you to customize the information displayed in the search results, to define a custom look and feel for this page.
To find out more about this feature, contact us or one of our solution providers for more information.
Seller Highlights
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United Kingdom
Featured Case Study: The Seattle Storm Wins Online with Amazon Webstore
Case study excerpt: “Success on the Court. Struggles on the Web. 2010 was an exciting year for the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. Their coach was named WNBA Coach of the Year; their star player was named MVP, and they won the league championship. They also lost the 3rd party vendor that was responsible for purchasing and selling team merchandise, both on and offline....” Read full story.
Connect With Us
Check out these recent blog posts, twitter feeds and Facebook fan page to help you build and grow on Amazon Webstore.
As business owners, we spend a lot of time figuring out what those shoppers want to buy and how to get them to come to our site. Once in the storefront, they spend time looking for just the right items. They click around, browse our fine selection, and put a few items in their shopping cart. And then, maddeningly, some people just stop... Read blog.
Amazon Webstore On The Road
Talk with us about building a powerful online presence. Join us or one of our partners at our upcoming events.
Join us at eTail West: Feb 22 - 25, 2011, Palm Desert, CA
Join us at Shop.org: March 8 - 10, 2011, San Francisco, CA
Join us at Internet Retailer: June 14 - 17, 2011, San Diego, CA
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