The business world is extremely complicated: with dozens, if not hundreds of pieces of tech being released weekly, it's quite complicated, sometimes, to keep up with the recent trends, especially in the world of SMBs (Small Medium Businesses), where everyone is trying to find that new thing which will scale them to new horizons. Amazon has recently launched a number of technological and business-oriented tools which were specifically tailored towards small and medium businesses. Let's analyse the matter in more detail with their flagship product: Storefronts.
What Is Amazon Storefronts?
Amazon Storefronts is a portal which directly lists a particular business' products on its platform: let's imagine you are a fast-fashion company, who sells graphic tees. Logically, the best business development plan would involve eCommerce strategies, but these require (generally) a website, multiple marketing platforms being involved and such. The creation of a website, per se, is already a complicated matter, especially if you're doing dropshipping or other forms of white-label sales. That's why many eCommerce entrepreneurs in recent years have moved over to Amazon, either creating their own store or by doing FBA. Amazon Storefronts, created in 2018, speeds up this process by directly listing your products from your site to the platform and vice-versa.
Is It Safe?
Amazon is the biggest online business in the world, with millions of stores being listed. Not only their architecture is extremely simple to use and navigate, especially when porting products from your store to theirs, but it is also extremely safe from both a financial and a purely cyber-related point of view. Amazon takes around 5% of your income per item, therefore it could be a great avenue to boost your conversion rate further if you're struggling with paid ads or other forms of marketing. Amazon also offers dedicated ads platform, which is set up for the very purpose of helping Storefronts-based businesses.
Storefronts For Services
Even if launched in 2018, Storefronts has been changing constantly: there are, in fact, a number of new features and many are speculating over the fact that Storefronts will eventually evolve into a service-based platform for businesses to acquire potential leads via Bezos' very own site. Although this certainly would be a gamechanger for both SMBs and Amazon itself, it's still definitely in its embryonic stages of development and will, most likely, be deployed once the "digitalization" of certain bulky sectors will stabilise in the next decade. It is still very important to say that certain sectors (i.e. Real Estate, Finance) are completely relying on a number of bulky and "face to face" oriented features.
To Conclude
Storefronts is definitely something which SMBs should take into consideration for this second half of 2020 (and beyond). The sole possibility of being able to instantly list your products from your store to Amazon and vice-versa is a solid selling point and it will definitely attract a number of SMBs during the second half of 2020. The future of Storefronts is definitely related to services and lead generation, we'll just have to wait and see.