Amazon products. How to create a correct listing - a guide.

Acquiring customers for our products in the sea of Amazon offers is quite a challenge. Firstly, we need to be discoverable and our products must be visible. When a customer lands and clicks on our product, how that product is presented to them and how convincing and enticing it is, is the key to sales.

We have noticed that many Amazon sellers spend a lot of time and resources attracting customers to their product through promotional and marketing campaigns, but do not devote as much time to the product descriptions. This is a mistake. Investing time in describing the product and creating a listing is a one-off task and is the key to effective sales. You must, of course, continuously optimise your listing, but what is most important is to do it well from the start. Below we will provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to properly create an Amazon listing.

Get to know your customer.

Find out who your customers are. Unfortunately, the fact that you know your product very well and are convinced of its value does not mean that your customers will see it in the same way straight away. You need to find out who your customers are, what they are looking for, what context they have, what they pay attention to, what will encourage them to buy, and what product features may raise doubts in them. How to gather such information? There are several ways:

 Benchmark products - find products similar to yours in the target Amazon market and analyse them in terms of how they communicate the products, what features they highlight, how their descriptions are structured, what pictures they have, and what bullet points.

 Customer reviews - read the product reviews from customers who have bought the given products and find out what they think of the product and what, if anything, did not suit them. This is a treasure trove of knowledge.

 Forums, blogs and Facebook - check what customers are saying about the category, products, what they are looking for, what products they have bought, what they noticed, what they value and what they do not.

 Customer experience - use Google and YouTube to find out how customers use the products you want to offer. For what applications, what do they pay attention to?

 Context - using Google and Amazon tools, gather as much information as possible about your customers' location, gender, age, the model they bought their product in, the average cost they allocated for the purchase, etc.

Rely on your own experience.

An important element is also your own experience as a buyer. Before you start creating a product listing, put yourself in the shoes of an Amazon customer on that marketplace and try to find products that you would buy yourself. After entering a search phrase, add 3-5 products to your cart without spending more than 10 minutes on it. After this process, consider the following points:

 Why did you click on the names of those particular products that you viewed?

 What features of the individual products caught your attention?

 Why did you ultimately decide to purchase those specific 3-5 products?

Gather all the data above into one document, read it, and organise it into sections regarding the product itself and its features, as well as customer experiences. Sleep on it and draw conclusions about how you will communicate your products and which USPs you will focus on.

Amazon keywords.

As the name suggests, this is a key element of the description :)  Do thorough research on which search terms your product should appear in the results? What keywords are competitive products achieving the best positions for, and how frequently do individual keywords appear in search results? There are plenty of tools on the market for researching keywords for product listings. Find popular products (preferably those in the top 100 of a given category) and check which keywords appear most frequently in their titles and descriptions.

Have you already collected the above data? You can start creating your listing.

Amazon product name.

The main task of the product name is, firstly, to match it to the category so that it can be easily indexed and searched, and to convince the customer to click on the product. The product name will be read by Amazon's robots and our customers, so the name must balance the requirements of both.

The most important guidelines for the product name (aka Title) are:

 Do not cram all the keywords into your product name.

Excessive use of keywords in descriptions can be penalised by Amazon and may additionally lower your listing's CTR. Focus on 2-3 keywords that should be included in your product description.

 Name sequence.

Amazon clearly states in the guidelines of its latest A9 algorithm how the sequence of the description should look. According to the A9 algorithm, the name should be structured in the following way:

PRODUCT BRAND + MODEL (NAME OR SYMBOL) + NAME OF THE PRODUCT ITSELF + PRODUCT TYPE + QUANTITY + COLOUR / PRODUCT VARIATION.

 Length of the name.

The length of the description depends on the category and in some cases it may be limited to a certain number of characters. General guidelines for product names suggest keeping them to about 120-150 characters including spaces. The system can accept longer names, even over 200 characters, but those are at risk of exclusion from search results "suppressed from search and browse". Try to ensure your product name adheres to Amazon's guidelines, contains the most important information about the product, a few keywords, but above all, that it is friendly for a potential customer who will read the name of that product and be convinced to click on it to learn more about it. Once a user finds themselves on the product listing, the task of the subsequent elements such as product images, bullet points, price, and description is to convert them from a visitor to a customer.

Bullet points.

Create bullet points that convince the user to purchase your product. Bullet points should be written in the language of benefits for the user, should contain the most important features of your product, and answer all the questions the customer may potentially have. When creating bullet points, adhere to the following guidelines:

 Be specific. Write simply but precisely about the features of your product. This is not the place for soft marketing but hard facts.

 Be concise and to the point. Use all 5 bullet points that Amazon allows you, but divide them so that each one focuses on a specific advantage/feature. Generally, the number of characters in each bullet point should not exceed 100 characters. Some markets and categories have limitations up to 200 or even 500 characters. Note: the system allows you to include more text (Professional account), but will index only the first 100 characters and you may additionally risk a penalty from the algorithm for "Non Compliance".

 Write directly to the customer. Explain to the customer why the features you mention are important and why your product is better than others, competitors.

 Refer to customer needs. Describe which of their problems can be solved by your product. Each bullet point can be started with one or two words describing the topic of that bullet point in uppercase letters, which facilitates navigation through the product listing.

 Start the bullet point with one/two summarising words in uppercase and then elaborate on that advantage after the colon.

 Write in sentence fragments, without a full stop at the end.

Below are a few examples of well-crafted bullet points from German and American Amazon.

Product description.

This is the place where you can convey more information about your product, its technical specifications, usage, and elaborate on its features and benefits in order to ultimately convince the user to make a purchase. The length of the description allowed by Amazon is 2000 bytes, which is about 300 words. This is sufficient to narratively tell the story of the product. Why this one and not another, why it was designed this way and not differently, what problems it will solve, what advantages it has, what makes it stand out? Be convincing, but not pushy. If the customer decided to scroll down to the description, they initially liked what they saw above - now you need to reassure them that your product is a good choice and dispel their doubts.

If you have any additional questions or concerns - write to us, add a question in the comment under the entry - we will be happy to answer and maybe this information will help other sellers.

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Happy Selling

Go2Market Crew