Amazon exec explains strategy behind Storefront, small business push

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• Amazon has launched a page to showcase small-and-medium-sized US businesses that sell on Amazon, called Storefronts.
• Customers told Amazon that they wanted to buy from “local” businesses easier, according to Nicholas Denissen, a vice president at Amazon and head of Amazon Marketplace Business.

Amazon’s new Storefronts page is open for business, and it gives customers a chance to shop from more local businesses.

The retailer’s brand-new hub for small and medium-sized businesses launched on Monday. The page features 20,000 businesses across categories like Home, Books, Jewelry, Electronics, and Beauty. It’s limited to US-based businesses, and Amazon says it has sellers from all 50 states.

Amazon created the new page because customers were looking for a way to more easily shop products from businesses native to their own country, according to Nicholas Denissen, a vice president at Amazon and head of Amazon Marketplace Business.

“We do hear anecdotally from customers that they get excited about supporting local businesses … one more way for them to understand who are the businesses behind the products that we’re buying,” he told Business Insider. “Local is a relative term.”

Amazon has been criticzed in the past for an invasion of foreign sellers on its US site, including a large number of Chinese tech companies, which has crowded out US-based sellers and small businesses. The new page could be a way to rectify that, and for customers to support these American small businesses, should they desire.

Amazon also introduced content to make the pages dynamic, and customers can get a feel for the brands on the page and the human stories behind them. 

“We had a number of signals from customers that they love products from these businesses. So that’s where we started,” Denissen said, repeating the Amazon adage of “starting from the customer and working backwards.”

Denissen said the new page has nothing to do with correcting or repairing Amazon’s reputation among either buyers or sellers, as some experts have described Storefronts as “PR outreach“ in an interview with Digiday.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with perception,” Denissen said. “It really has to do with listening to what our customers say, how our customers behave, and just innovating on that front.”

The page does, however, help get the word out about the small and medium businesses that sell on Amazon, which the company says makes up half of its business.

“A lot of customers don’t even realize that they’re buying from small and medium-sized busineses [on Amazon],” Denissen said.

To select the 20,000 vendors and one million products featured on the Storefront section, Denissen said that Amazon chose top sellers and merchandise, both with good reviews on the platform. 

As far as what could come next from Amazon, or if Amazon would create more pages for curated selections from limited sellers, Denissen was mum.

“As [Amazon CEO] Jeff [Bezos] would say, this is day one,” Denissen. “I would almost call this day zero for us. It’s still early stages. We’re looking to learn from this launch, to learn more from our customers, to learn more from the businesses, and based on those learnings .. we’ll improve, iterate, evolve.”