The Ultimate Guide to Selling on Amazon - Chapter 2 - Listing Your Products

Once you’ve found a great range of products to sell on Amazon from a trusted wholesale supplier (more about that later), the next key thing to get right is how you list them on the Marketplace. Get this right, and you’ll stand a much better chance of catching potential customers’ attention, as well as pleasing the all-seeing eye of Amazon’s algorithm and increasing your chances of becoming a regular Buy Box winner and an Amazon Best Seller.

Seller Engine

Optimize Your Product Listing

So, what do you need to do to make sure the products you list on Amazon are noticed above your competitors’ products?

First of all, you’ll want to get the title of your listing right. Back in the day, sellers would simply load every bit of the title and the product description with keywords in the hope that Amazon’s much more primitive algorithm would be tricked into suggesting their product to the consumer over a competitor’s. However, things are a lot more nuanced nowadays. To optimize your listing title, you’ll need to think about incorporating some – or all – of the following elements:

Brand
Product Line
Key Features
Product Type
Size & Color
Quantity & Packaging

When deciding on a title, you’ll want to stick closely to how Amazon words its own products in listings. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to capitalize the first letter of each word of your title; spell out all words (so no ‘lb’, ‘kg’, etc.); make sure all your numbers are in numerals, not spelled out (‘7’ as opposed to ‘seven’); list the size of the product and the color only if relevant.

What you’ll not want to do in your listing is include the price of the product – that comes later. Also, don’t include your seller info, don’t capitalize the entire title, don’t be tempted to put in things like ‘BEST SELLER’ or ‘SALE!’ and avoid symbols such as ‘&’, ‘!’ and ‘?’.

It’s all about keywords when you list your product. The more keywords you can get into the front end of your title and your product description, the better. However, don’t be tempted to cram every inch of your title and product description with keywords – that’s what sellers used to do until Amazon grew wise to the practice. Now a more nuanced approach is necessary to stand out and stand a better chance of the algorithm picking you over your competitors.

Next, you’ll want to consider the images you use carefully. The images on a product listing help customers connect with the product on a whole different level than just reading a description on a page on a website. Amazon stipulates that each product displayed on its site needs to be displayed against a white background, and each image uploaded to its site must be a minimum of 1000 x 1000px (for on-site zooming purposes). If possible, try to find images that are at least 2000 x 2000px, as these will enhance the customer viewing experience, and has been shown to improve conversion rates.

Next, make the most of the bullet points – Amazon allocates each seller a number of bullet points in which to display pertinent information about the product as part of the product description. You don’t have to use all these bullet points if you don’t want to or don’t need to, though we certainly recommend that you do.

It’s quite a common rule of thumb that your first few bullet points should be used to emphasize your product’s key features, and that the last few should be used to answer important questions the customer is most likely to ask.

Finally, don’t neglect the product description. A lot of sellers do, as the description is buried away at the bottom of the listing and it’s generally considered (without much evidence) that the customer does not venture that far down the page before making their minds up. This is debatable. As far as we’re concerned, it’s an extra 2000 words to add meat to the bones of your product. Plus, with limited HTML allowed, it’s the one part of the site you can add your own emphasis to make the paragraph stand out from the herd.

Here you can see an example of a product listing that makes the most of the listing options available:

Amazon

As you can see, each word of the title has been capitalized, and the title itself conveys all the important information about the product. The image not only shows off the product in its best light, but also includes a color grid to show the customer that it is available in a wide variety of colors, giving the customer more choice. There are also several supplementary images that the customer can click on to view the product in more detail.

All sizes are shown in individual boxes, as are the available colors. This means a customer can select the right size and color they want without hunting around the site any further. This contributes to customer retention.

Finally, the seller has utilized five bullet points to further inform the customer about the product. All in all, this is an excellent product listing, and you should aim to emulate this when listing your own products.

Now let’s take a look at an example of a poorly-listed product.

Amazon

As you can see, the title has not been fleshed out with pertinent information. It also contains an ampersand (the ‘&’ symbol), which is a big no-no when listing products on Amazon.

There is only one image, which is fine, but we always recommend using several images to give your customers a better visual feel for the product. More images also look better on the listing, making it look more ‘filled out’ and visually appealing.

The bullet points do not inform the customer, but are in fact a series of keywords and category descriptions. While there is nothing wrong with using keywords (such as in the listing title), the bullet points need to be more fleshed out than this, answering common customer questions as well as adding key product features.

Getting your listing looking just right is one of the key aspects to success when selling on Amazon. There are of course other factors at play, but getting the product listing right is one of the reasons why the first example we have shown you here appears on page one of an Amazon search result for ‘dog collar’, and the second example appears on page four hundred. To avoid this fate, make sure you take the time to make your product listing as attractive and informative as it can possibly be.