Shop By Brand

If you poke around Amazon and land on certain category pages you will notice that Amazon has started featuring certain brands under a title that says “Shop by Brand.” If you are like us, you are probably curious why these brands are showing up. Is Amazon featuring enterprise Vendor Central brands? Is this paid placement?

We reached out to Amazon to find out.

They told us that placement is automatically populated by top searched or performing brands in the category. The system automatically places logos based on the customer's buying and search behavior. Placement is solely determined by an internal algorithm based on a variety of factors and no manual intervention has been made.

When asked if this is reserved for Vendor Central brands, Amazon said that it considers all brands, although being Brand Registered helps.

Top Brands Filter

Another similar change is the new filter that appears on the left in some categories. It gives you two new options: Top Brands and Our Brands. While we know Amazon is trying to push it’s own house brands, it’s interesting that this is another way to filter out smaller and private-labeled brands.

We also asked Amazon what the criteria is to rank for this.

Amazon responded that the “Top Brand” filter is a pilot program available exclusively to brands Amazon has selected. The criteria for selection includes the availability of your products, quality of customer reviews and pricing. While this program is in beta, your brand can only participate if Amazon has invited you. We did just get confirmation that this is only available to brands on Vendor Central.

What the Data Suggests

Look at the results for who has the Buy Box on items that appear using the filter “Top Brands.” It is almost exclusively Amazon. SP stands for sponsored placement and doesn’t count. The only one that isn’t Amazon is a brand that Amazon still sells.

We compared the brands listed under both the “Top Brands” and “Featured Brands” to Best Sellers in Boys' Fashion and it didn’t entirely match. While some brands did match, they were always brands that were sold by Amazon. Only one brand that was exclusively FBA or FBM popped up which was Kid Nation. Interestingly enough, that brand did not rank in Top 100 for this category while many others did. The average product review score (4.15) is slightly lower than the (4.28) that brand Leveret (the highest ranked FBA brand on the Top 100 in this category) achieved and its revenue was just over half (~$326k vs. ~$550k). The search term “leveret pajamas boys” has a Search Frequency Rank of 214,074 vs. “kid nation” which has a Search Frequency Rank of 655,856. This doesn’t follow the logic that Amazon supplied.

We see this pattern replicated in other Categories. In the Vitamins & Dietary Supplements category we see household brand names listed as Shop by Brand and lesser known brands dominate the Bestsellers List. We also see all the brands listed on the Shop by Brand area have Amazon in the Buy Box.

Summary

Both the “Shop by Brand” and “Top Brand” filter appear to be an experiment for Amazon to showcase established and well-known brands that traditionally haven’t been savvy marketers on Amazon. They also appear to give brands and products that Amazon has the Buy Box for, an advantage. It will be interesting to see if top-selling smaller or private-labeled brands emerge in these lists. Our guess is that their appearance will be rare. It will also be interesting to see how this drives additional traffic to the enterprise brands on Vendor Central.