By Neville Chamunorwa
Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world, attracting more than 200 million unique visitors every month. It’s also home to millions of sellers worldwide, which makes for some tough competition. So how do you make your listings stand out in such a crowded arena? The short answer is unique and compelling product descriptions.
Given Amazon’s fiercely competitive environment, it’s crucial to get your listing right. This has become somewhat of an art form. You need to balance meeting Amazon’s guidelines but also add a touch of creativity to set your products apart in such a saturated market.
In this article, we cover all you need to know about writing Amazon descriptions that deliver ready-to-buy customers to your listings and help you to grow your sales.
The importance of Amazon product descriptions
In traditional brick-and-mortar stores, sales assistants are on hand to help customers find and make a decision on the most ideal products to buy. Online, sellers must rely on their product descriptions to fulfill this role.
With such fine margins on Amazon, a well-written product description can make all the difference. When crafted correctly, it acts as a signpost that directs traffic to your listing. The more visitors your listing welcomes, the more chances you get to convert them into customers.
Copy that is purposefully constructed will make you look more professional, build a level of credibility with potential buyers, and ultimately nudge them towards completing the checkout process.
Understand your customers
To create effective Amazon product descriptions, you must first understand your target audience. This means that you must produce copy that addresses your customers’ needs, rather than simply listing all of your product’s features.
Perhaps you sell baby monitors, for example. Instead of just listing specs and features (e.g., sound detection; phone notification), your aim should be to appeal to the needs of parents. In other words, address their pain points and explain how your monitor can ease their concerns about being separated from their child:
Put your mind at ease—advanced sound detection never misses your baby’s cry and promptly sends notifications to your phone.
If you’re struggling to identify customer concerns, consider browsing the Q&A section of similar products on Amazon. Also make sure to read through both good and bad reviews. It will give you an indication of the most common queries and allow you to highlight the popular benefits of the product while addressing recurring concerns that customers may have.
Meeting Amazon’s guidelines
Before writing your product descriptions, you must read Amazon’s product detail page rules. Here you will find a list of things to avoid. If you fail to comply with these guidelines, Amazon will flag your listing as low quality.
Low-quality listings negatively impact your sales as they’re pushed to the bottom of search results. In some cases, Amazon may remove your listing altogether depending on the extent to which your listing breaches the platform’s guidelines.
Amazon title descriptions
Your title is the first thing that Amazon shoppers come across when they see your product listed on the site. According to Amazon Seller Central, product titles must follow the criteria below:
- They must include product-identifying information such as “running shoes” or “T-shirt.”
- They cannot exceed 200 characters, including spaces.
- They should not contain promotional phrases like “100% quality guaranteed” or “free shipping.”
- They should not have decorative characters; for example, ^ * | { } ! # $ _
Your title should generally follow this formula:
Product Brand + Collection/Model/Line (including the product identifying information) + Any other useful information as applicable, such as material/ingredients, size/color, quantity
Examples of titles that adhere to Amazon’s best practice guidelines include:
- Nike Revolution 5 Men’s Running Shoes In Navy Blue/White
- Levi’s Classic Logo T-Shirt For Women, Made From Organic Cotton In A Pack of 5
Key feature bullet points
Once you’ve gotten the attention of shoppers with your compelling title, the copy must inch them towards your desired outcome: making a purchase. Here you can explain your product in more detail and address the needs of your target audience.
You need to create a list of five bullet points that are less than 200 characters each. It helps customers clearly identify the most important aspects of your product. On some page layouts, Amazon will only display the first three bullet points, and the customer must click “More” to see the remaining two. As such, make sure you prioritize your three most valuable features in the first three bullet points.
How does your product help your customers solve their problems? Always keep this front of mind as you produce your copy. Crafting your listings with the use of some emotive language that will resonate with your target customers is an excellent tactic to employ here. Let’s take the baby monitors product mentioned previously as an example:
Put your mind at ease—advanced sound detection never misses your baby’s cry and promptly sends notifications to your phone.
“Put your mind at ease” or “never miss your baby’s cry” is more likely to tug at the heartstrings of caring parents, while still delivering the main features of the product.
If your product relates to sensations like taste, sound, or smell, you must compensate for the inability to experience these sensations in person. For this, you may want to increase the use of sensory words in your descriptions. Try to avoid overused words and phrases that customers are tired of hearing, as this won’t make your product stand out.
Product descriptions
Amazon’s product description section allows you to elaborate on your key feature bullet points. It has a character limit of 2,000, including spaces, to give you an opportunity to highlight anything else that would be useful for your customer to know.
Follow a similar approach to the key feature bullet points, but in more of a storytelling manner where possible since you’ll have extra space. It’s the best method to build a stronger connection with your audience, which helps to increase conversions.
Use Amazon’s inventory templates
If you’re struggling with the format of your product descriptions, Amazon offers inventory templates that can help you. These templates are excellent for adding product listings in bulk as you can list various types of products across different categories all from one template. You can also customize templates to suit your individual requirements.
Start by choosing a category for your product with the Product Classifier. This will help you identify which template you need to download. Then, fill out your template file using your product data, and upload your inventory file.
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SEO keywords in your key feature bullet points and product descriptions
SEO is often underutilized on Amazon as many sellers mistakenly think it does not apply. But Amazon SEO works similar to search engines using an algorithm called A9. A9 is engineered to help consumers find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. It uses a range of variables to determine the rank of each product in search results.
The A9 algorithm tracks both click to sales rates (CTSR) and sales page content. CTSR is defined by the number of customers who purchase your product after clicking on the listing. This is extremely valuable as it heavily influences the results page by paying particular attention to recent sales. Sales page content simply refers to the use of keywords in your listing, that helps A9 identify your product correctly and match it to searches so you rank higher in the results page.
Choosing the best keywords requires some research. The first option is to use a free Amazon keyword tool like Sonar. Sonar lets you research the best keywords for your listing in relation to the most searched terms on Amazon’s website. Simply search for your chosen keyword and Sonar will show how frequently it is used in addition to other related keywords.
Checking out your competitors is also a great method of identifying the best keywords. Visit the top listings for similar products and see which keywords are used most often.
You’ll generally want to include keywords with the highest search volume. However, they must be relevant to your product. Using irrelevant keywords to get more traffic will end up doing more harm than good because a considerable portion of your traffic will click away from your product without buying it. Amazon will monitor this over time through your click to sales rate, and as it starts to drop, so too will your place on the results page. As a result, you must ensure you find the right balance between search volume and relevance.
What about images?
You’re going to need some high-quality product images to accompany your key feature bullet points and product descriptions. These images must adhere to Amazon’s product image guidelines. Here’s a short summary of the most important things to consider:
- Images must accurately represent the product that is being sold.
- The product and features must be clearly visible.
- Images must be 1,000 pixels or larger in either height or width and less than 10,000 pixels on the longest side.
- Images must not display excluded accessories that may deceive customers.
- Images must match the product title.
Mistakes to watch out for in your listings
You may find that crafting Amazon listings that lead to more sales doesn’t happen from the onset. But making yourself aware of some of the most common avoidable mistakes can be extremely helpful. These include:
- Poor grammar
- Spelling mistakes
- Overcomplicated language that your typical customer may not understand
- Plagiarizing your competitors’ descriptions
- Over-explaining product features rather than explaining the benefits of using the product
A quick recap
Writing Amazon product descriptions that stand out from the crowd is no mean feat in such a fiercely competitive marketplace. First, take the time to understand your target customer. It will help you explain how your product solves a problem or makes the lives of your customers easier rather than simply listing all of its incredible features.
From there you need to familiarize yourself with Amazon’s guidelines so that you can optimize your titles, key feature bullet points, product descriptions, and images. This optimization process extends to SEO as well. Since Amazon is a search engine in its own right, knowing how to produce listings that rank highly in search results can have a direct positive impact on your sales. It’s a jungle out there and only those who know what they are doing will survive.
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