How to set up an Amazon Storefront: what actually goes into it
A Storefront is the closest thing a brand gets to its own website inside Amazon — a multi-page, branded home base that sits behind your listings and your ads. It's also one of those things that looks simple in the builder and turns out to have a surprising number of prerequisites and exact specs hiding underneath.
Here's what actually needs to be true before you start, and what tends to go wrong along the way.
What you need before you touch the builder
A Storefront is gated behind Amazon Brand Registry, and Brand Registry itself needs a registered (or pending) trademark from a recognized IP office — USPTO, EUIPO, DPMA, UKIPO, JPO and similar. Your brand name has to match that trademark exactly, and your logo needs to be permanently affixed to the physical product or its packaging — a removable sticker doesn't count. You'll also need a professional seller account, which runs $39.99 a month, and your account needs to be in good standing with no open suspensions or policy violations.
None of this happens overnight. Trademark registration typically takes 6 to 12 months and costs somewhere around $225–$400 per class in the US (roughly €700–€1,500 in the EU). Once that's through, Brand Registry approval itself is usually quick — 2 to 10 business days with clean documentation.
Choosing a template
Amazon's Storefront builder offers four starting templates, and picking the right one saves a lot of rework later. Marquee is built for premium products and brand storytelling and usually takes 2–3 days to build properly. Product Grid suits large catalogs of similar SKUs and is the fastest to put together, often 1–2 days. Product Highlight is aimed at bestsellers and new launches, around 2 days. Blank gives full creative control but takes the longest, typically 4–7 days, and is where most agency-built stores start.
The template mostly determines how much manual design work you're signing up for — grid layouts auto-populate from your catalog, while blank and marquee layouts need every section built by hand.
Building the pages
A Storefront can carry up to three levels of navigation and multiple pages, each with its own meta description, which matters more for search than most sellers expect. Page titles automatically generate the navigation menu, so naming them clearly is worth doing early rather than fixing later.
On specs: hero banner images are recommended at 3,000 x 600 pixels, video should be at least 1,920 x 1,080, and your logo needs a transparent-background PNG. Product grids can carry ASINs from across your catalog, but if you're populating one manually you're capped at 500 per page. Keep your main call-to-action above the first scroll, use direct language like “Shop Now” instead of anything decorative, and check contrast against the background — it's a common reason clean designs still read as hard to use.
What gets a Storefront sent back
Amazon reviews every submitted store, usually within 24–72 hours, and rejections tend to cluster around the same handful of issues: images that don't match the required dimensions, tiles or buttons that look clickable but aren't, interactive elements that mislead about what they'll do, and visible prices baked into images — pricing has to come from live listing data, not artwork.
Comparisons to competitors and any contact details or links that take shoppers off Amazon are also automatic rejections. None of these are exotic rules, but they're easy to miss when a design is coming from a general marketing team rather than someone used to Amazon's specific policies.
After it goes live
A Storefront isn't something you build once and leave — stores updated within the last 90 days tend to hold onto more repeat visitors, and multi-page stores with genuine sections tend to keep people browsing longer than single-page ones. A quarterly refresh is a reasonable minimum, and Amazon's versioning and scheduling tools let you line up seasonal changes in advance rather than editing live.
It's also worth remembering the Storefront isn't picky about fulfillment — it displays your ASINs the same way whether they're FBA, FBM, or a mix, so there's no reason to wait on a fulfillment decision before building one.
Doing it yourself vs. getting it built
Some of this is genuinely simple — filling in a template with your own catalog doesn't need outside help. Where it gets slower is the custom design work: building a Blank or Marquee layout by hand, matching every image to its exact spec, and testing across desktop and mobile before submitting, since a rejection adds days back onto the timeline.
If you've got Brand Registry sorted and just need the store itself designed and built to spec, that's exactly the kind of work we do at ARTH.
Questions we hear a lot
How much does it cost to build an Amazon Storefront?
The Storefront itself is free to build once you're in Brand Registry — there's no listing fee or subscription from Amazon. The real costs are the professional seller account ($39.99/month), the trademark you need to get into Brand Registry in the first place, and whatever design time goes into the build.
How long does the whole process take from scratch?
If you don't have a trademark yet, plan for 6–12 months on that alone, then a few business days for Brand Registry approval, then anywhere from 1–7 days to build the store depending on the template, plus a 24–72 hour Amazon review. If your trademark is already in place, the whole thing can realistically happen in under two weeks.
Can I set up a Storefront without a registered trademark?
Not directly — Brand Registry, which gates the Storefront, requires at least a pending trademark application in most cases. A pending application is enough to apply; it doesn't have to be fully granted yet.
Does it matter if some products are FBA and others are self-fulfilled?
No. The Storefront pulls live listing data regardless of fulfillment method, so a mix of FBA and FBM products works exactly the same way.
Can I make changes myself after the Storefront is built?
Yes, Amazon's builder is designed to be editable by the brand at any time, and tools like versioning and scheduling let you plan changes for specific dates without having to rebuild anything from scratch.
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