the content26 guide to amazon vendor central templates
DESCRIPTION
We dig into the A+ templates in Amazon's Vendor Central, helping you decide if they're the right choice for your products and which templates make the best A+ pages. 1. Title 2. Table of contents: Intro, Features, Tips, Conclusion 3. What is Vendor Central? Vendor Central (VC) was introduced years ago as a self-service interface for Amazon vendors. In 2013 it expanded to include templates for A+ page creation. 4. Today, almost all Amazon departments require vendors to use VC to upload and create A+ pages, including Baby, Sports & Outdoor, Beauty & Health, Electronics, Home & Kitchen, and Grocery. 5. In case you've never seen an A+ template, here's a basic depiction. 6. And here's what the template looks like after content has been added. 7. A+ pages have been shown to increase shopper engagement, increase conversion rates, decrease the number of bad reviews, and improve branding on Amazon. 8. So! Let's talk about what the self-service templates can (and can't) do for you. 9. Self-Service Templates Features 10. 1. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get... Mostly) 11. WYSIWYG. You don't get a full preview when you submit your A+ pages via the template, but you get a pretty good idea of where the images and paragraphs will appear in the final product.* *Barring any changes by Amazon during upload. But we'll get to that. 12. 2. Fast Publishing 13. Fast Publishing. Though it isn't standard across all departments, we've seen completed product pages go live in just a couple of days. In the pre-VC days, manual upload via site merchandisers could take as long as several weeks. 14. 3. Easy to Use. No Coding Required. 15. Vendor Central's templates make it pretty simple to add text and images. Since the placement is fixed, you can create an A+ page with no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or anything else technical.. 16. 4. No Preview Capabilities 17. When you submit your pages, you'll find that VC lacks a preview function. You'll get a general sense of text and image placement from the template, but you won't know what the product page looks like until it's live on the site. 18. Amazon can later or even reject pages that violate its style requirements. Our clients have seen paragraphs disappear, images changed, and text altered without any notification from Amazon. 19. 5. One Size Fits All 20. It can be difficult for very simple and very complicated products alike to fit into the limited templates, though technical (and more expensive) items struggle the most with the lack of adaptability. 21. Templates make it difficult to include: -Footnotes -Superscript -Symbols -Comparison charts 22. Only 1 in 8 A+ templates includes a chart. 23. Bulk Uploads Not Allowed (this can be time consuming)TRANSCRIPT
