Getting customers for our products in the sea of Amazon listings is quite a challenge. Firstly, we need to be findable and our products need to be visible. Once a customer has clicked on our product, how that product is presented to them and how much it persuades and encourages them is the key to selling.

We have noticed that many Amazon sellers spend a lot of time and resources on attracting customers to their product through promotional and marketing campaigns, but they don’t spend as much time on the product descriptions themselves. This is a mistake. The investment of time in describing a product and creating a listing is a one-off and is the key to successful sales. Of course, you need to optimise your listing all the time, but the most important thing is to do it right from the start. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to create an Amazon listing correctly.

Know your customer.

Find out who your customers are. Unfortunately, just because you know your product very well and are convinced of its value doesn’t mean your customers will see it that way right away. You need to find out who your customers are, what they are looking for, what their context is, what they pay attention to, what will encourage them to sell and what product features might make them doubtful. What can you do to get this information? There are several ways:

– Benchmark products – find products similar to yours on your target Amazon marketplace and analyse them in terms of how they communicate the products, what features they highlight, how their description is structured, what images and bullet points they have.

– Customer reviews – read product reviews from customers who have bought the product and find out what they thought about the product and what they possibly didn’t like. This is a treasure trove of knowledge.

– Forums, blogs and Facebook – check what customers write about the category, products, what they are looking for, what products they bought, what they paid attention to, 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 uses, what do they pay attention to?

– Context – using Google and Amazon tools, gather as much information as you can about your customers’ location, gender, age, the model they bought their product in, the average cost they spent, etc.

Rely on your experience.

Your own experience as a buyer is also an important element. Before you start creating a product listing, play the role of an Amazon customer on a particular marketplace and try to find products that you would buy yourself. After typing in your search phrase, add 3-5 products to your cart without spending more than 10 minutes of your time doing so. After this process, reflect on the following points:

– Why did you click on the names of the very products you were looking at?

– What features of each product attracted your attention?

– Why did you finally decide to buy these 3-5 products?

Gather all the above data into one document, read it, organise it into a section about the product itself and its features and customer experience. Sleep on it and draw conclusions on how you will communicate your products and what USPs you will bet on.

Amazon Keywords.

As the name says this is a key part of the description.  Do a decent research on what search terms your product should appear in the results? What keywords do competing products rank best on and how often do particular keywords appear in search results. There are quite a few tools on the market for finding keyword product listings. Find popular products (preferably those in the top 100 of a given category) and check which keywords appear most frequently in their names and descriptions.

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

Amazon Product Name.

The most important task of the product name is firstly to fit the product into the category so that it is easily indexed and searched and secondly to convince the customer to click on the product. The product name will be read by Amazon robots and our customers so you need to balance the requirements of both in the name.

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

– Don’t pack all keywords into your product name.

Excessive use of keywords in descriptions can be penalized by Amazon and can further lower the CTR of your listing. Focus on 2-3 keywords that should be included in your product description.

– Sequence of the name

Amazon clearly defines in the guidelines of its latest A9 algorithm how the description sequence should look like. According to the A9 algorithm, the name should be constructed as follows:

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

– Length of the name

The length of the description depends on the category and in some it may be limited to a certain number of characters. General guidelines for product names suggest sticking to a length of around 120-150 characters with spaces. The system may accept longer names, even above 200 characters but these are at risk of being excluded from search results “suppressed from search and browse”. Try to make sure that the name of your product complies with Amazon’s guidelines, contains the most important information about the product, some keywords, but most of all it should be friendly for the potential customer who will read the name of the product and convince him/her to click on the name and learn more about it. Once the user is on the product listing, the task of further elements such as product picture, bullet points, price and description is to convert him from a visitor into a customer.

Bullet points.

Create bullet points so that they convince the user to buy 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 about your product. When creating bullet points, stick to the following guidelines:

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

– Be concise and succinct. Use all 5 bullet points that Amazon allows you to use, but divide them up so that each one concludes around one specific benefit/attribute. Generally, the number of characters in each bullet point should not exceed 100 characters. Some markets and categories have a limit of 200 or even 500 characters. Please note: the system will allow you to post more text (Professional account) but will only index the first 100 characters and you may be penalised by the algorithm for “Non Compliance”.

– Write directly to the client. Explain to the customer why the features you are writing about are important and why your product is better than other, competing products.

– Refer to the customer’s needs. Write which of their problems can be solved with your product. You can start each bullet point with one or two words describing the topic of the bullet point in capital letters, making it easy to navigate through the product listing.

– Ideally, start the bullet point with a one/two word summary in capital letters and then expand on that after the colon

– Write in sentence equivalents, without a full stop at the end

Here are some examples of well-crafted bullet points from German and American Amazon.

Product description.

This is the place where you can give more information about your product, its technical specifications, how to use it, develop a description of its features and benefits so as to ultimately convince the user to buy it. The length of description allowed by Amazon is 2000 entities, or about 300 words. This is enough to tell the story of the product in a narrative way. Why this one and not another, why was it created this way and not another, what problems will it solve, what advantages does it have, what makes it different? Be convincing, but not pushy. If the client decided to scroll down to the description and initially liked what he saw above – now you have to reassure him that your product is a good choice and dispel his doubts.

If you have additional questions or doubts – write to us, add your question in the comments under the post – we will be happy to answer and maybe this information will help other sellers.

We are happy to share our knowledge within the Go2Market Community – become an active member.

Happy Selling

Go2Market Crew