Sell More on Amazon: How to Create Top-notch Product Listings

Amazon is one of the major league players for retailers wanting to sell online. There’s a lot of competition out there, so it’s important to know how to create flawless product listings. Doing this will give you a fighting chance for the Amazon buy box and boost your overall sales.

So what goes into having optimised listings that comply with all of Amazon’s regulations? With so many factors that are out of your control, it’s important to do everything that is in your power to make your product listings stand out. Optimising your product listings will have many benefits like increasing your CTR (click through rate), search visibility, and CR (conversion rate). 

There are a number of elements that you can nail down, so we’re here to give you the tools to do that. In this article we want to drill down through things like titles, images, customer reviews and more. We’ll also go over other aspects of your listings like making them to work with Amazon’s SEO (search engine optimisation) and how to best handle your inventory. Let’s get started!

Create Amazon product titles that convert 

The titles of your listings have two primary purposes: they help people find your products and they encourage them to click to find out more. They’re one of the first things about your listings that shoppers will take notice of while browsing Amazon and one of the most important things to get right. A good product title will not only help your brand, but will also improve sales by helping customers find your product with relevant searches.

When writing a title, there are Amazon guidelines you should be aware of as well as optimisation strategies. Let's start with the guidelines.

Amazon’s title guidelines

The length of the title is the most important - it cannot be longer than 200 characters. Amazon explicitly states that any products with titles longer than this will be suppressed in search results. This is to prevent keyword stuffing where people create artificially long titles in an attempt to rank in more search results. It’s also important to understand Amazon's objectives - it wants your title to "assist the customer in understanding the product".

There are some additional guidelines you should be aware of: 

• Capitalise the first letter in each word but don't capitalise all the letters in a word. The exception to this are words like "and", "for", "the", "an", and "in". These words should be in all lowercase.
• Use numbers, not words (i.e. 5 instead of five).
• If the product is a pack, state how many items are in the pack.
• Spell out measurement words such as "inch" rather than abbreviating them
• Include size and color if it is relevant and/or the product comes in multiple sizes or color options

Be careful not to include these things: 

• Special characters ("!", "?" etc). This includes "&". You should spell this out in lowercase letters (i.e. "and").
• Price
• Quantity (unless it’s relevant, like a pack of socks)
• Information about you
• Promotional phrases ("sale", "offer", "free shipping", etc)
• Subjective commentary (i.e., “best seller")

How to optimise your titles

You should include a number of elements in your titles to optimise them for Amazon, usually in this order:

1. Brand name - in most cases, this should be the first part of your title.
2. Keywords - keywords are crucial as they describe what your product does as well as giving context to the user's search.
3. Model numbers and other descriptive elements (color, quantity, or size variations) - this helps customers compare products

By using a third party tool like Egrow.io, you can take the information you already have in your product feed and rearrange it in the order needed. 

What do good titles look like?

First, let's start with an example of a product title that’s trying to do too much: 

"Are you tired from just trying to read it as well? While this title has terms such as ‘Silicone Kitchen Utensils’ to help it from a visibility point of view, it could benefit from some optimisation." 

Here is an example of a better title for a similar product:

"This product has a concise product title with all the necessary details within it to appear in the relevant product searches. They were able to convey that many tools are included by just using the word ‘set’ rather than listing out each individual tool."

The recommended length for a product title is less than 80 characters, although Amazon permits up to 200. According to Amazon, titles with less than 80 characters makes it easier for customers to find - and ultimately buy - your item. Sellers with insufficient product titles may find their items suppressed (aka, hidden). Amazon also provides title structure recommendations split out by category.

Let’s take a look at apparel. If you are selling clothing you'll find that it has the most rigid format recommendation:

• Apparel Parent Product Title: Brand + department and/or size + product name
  Example: Nike, Men’s Running Shoes, Rosherun.
• Child Product Title: Brand + department and/or size + product name + size + color
  Example: Nike, Men’s Running Shoes, Rosherun, 9 M UK, Gray 

Including your brand first in your product titles helps with brand awareness among shoppers. 

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