How to optimize your Amazon product listings to boost sales: Quick guide for brand owners

Amazon is by far the world’s largest online retailer, with net sales of $574.8 billion in 2023 and 50% of all online product searches starting on the platform. But with over 2 million active sellers on Amazon, it’s not easy for brands to stand out from the competition. In addition to having a strong Amazon advertising strategy, it's also vital to ensure your Amazon products are easily findable for shoppers.

If you are a brand owner selling on Amazon, you can greatly improve your sales by optimizing your product listings. In this article, we’ll share our top recommendations for how to bring each element of your brand's Amazon product listings to the next level.

7 best practices for optimizing your brand's Amazon product listings

Before we cover the elements of a perfect Amazon product listing, here are 8 best practices that apply, no matter what product your brand is trying to sell on the platform:

1. Always follow Amazon’s guidelines: To ensure the best performance – and avoid product listings or elements being rejected – review and understand Amazon’s requirements before posting product content on the platform.
2. Always use the right product categories: Carefully review Amazon’s product category options and always assign your products to the correct category to ensure they are easily findable.
3. Know your target audience: When selling on Amazon, it's essential to keep up with the latest marketplace dynamics, including shopping trends. Understanding your customers’ needs, interests and preferences will help you create product listings that appeal to them.
4. Create an immersive shopping experience: Use the options available to you to create a memorable branded storefront on Amazon that stands out from the crowds of seemingly nameless Amazon sellers.
5. Focus on benefits: Ensure that each element you add to a product listing highlights a benefit and showcases the value of your product.
6. Use high-quality visuals: Use the best quality visuals to bring your products to life for your customers.
7. Keep descriptions tidy and easily skimmable: Use bullet points wisely to convey key information. Avoid long, complex text blocks. Make all the most important details instantly available to your customers.

Next, we’ll go through all components of an Amazon product listing and show you how to optimize each one, from product titles and images, to bullet lists, descriptions, keywords and customer reviews.

Product titles

Choosing a great product title for each Amazon listing is essential, because the product title tells Amazon’s A9 search algorithm what your product is and whether it’s relevant to an Amazon shopper’s search.

Amazon gives you up to 250 characters for the product title for most product categories, but will truncate the title after 200 characters. Still, 200 characters is plenty of space to provide a rich, descriptive product title. Here’s what to do:

• Start with your brand name, followed by your main keyword for the product.
• Use the full length (200 characters) available to you to provide as much useful information about the product as possible.
• Include multiple keywords, but never repeat keywords (this will not improve keyword competitiveness on Amazon, as the platform actively discourages keyword stuffing).
• Include key product features, such as product size and who/what the product is for.
• Capitalize the first letter of each word for ease of reading, but do not use all caps.
• Do not include price information or promotional messaging (such as words like “discount” or “on sale”).
• Do not use symbols

Images and videos

Amazon lets you include up to 9 images for your product descriptions including videos (if you're enrolled in the Brand Registry/eligible for A+ Content). To get the most impact out of your visuals:

• Always include more than 1 visual for each product (again, use all the opportunities available to you on Amazon to showcase different benefits of your products).
• Use images with a minimum size of 1000 x 500 pixels and a max. of 10,000 px on the longest side. For the optimal zoom quality, use photos that are 1600 px or larger on the longest side.
• Be sure each image contains different information (avoid posting multiple similar images).
• The product must fill at least 85% of the picture (avoid pictures with large, complex backgrounds).
• Visuals must accurately display the product (avoid exaggeration)
• Show the product in realistic settings that your target customer can relate to.
• Product videos are known to boost conversion on Amazon by up to 250%, which means it is definitely worthwhile to include high-quality product videos (only available for A+ Content brands).
• Include handy product comparison tables to showcase the benefits of your products compared to others (only available for A+ Content brands).

“About this item” bullet list

After the product title and images, the “About this item” section (bullet list) is the first thing customers will see. This is your chance to make a strong impression and a compelling argument for your product.

If you are enrolled in Amazon’s brand registry, you can include as many bullet points as you want. However, after 1,000 characters, the list will be truncated. It’s a good idea to stick to 5 bullet points with around 200 characters each. That way, all information will be immediately visible. Here are some tips for optimizing your bullet points:

• Start with the most important benefit or USP.
• Include information that is especially relevant for your target audiences.
• Keep all bullet items under 200 characters.
• Start each bullet point with a capital letter.
• Include keywords, but avoid keyword stuffing.

Product description

The product description section gives you more room to make the case for your product. But with a 2,000-character limit, it’s essential to use this space strategically. Here are our top tips to optimize Amazon product descriptions:

• Expand on your bullet points to provide richer details about key features.
• Introduce additional features or benefits not covered in bullet points.
• Highlight real-life use cases that your target customers can relate to.
• Support your product claims with endorsements and professional opinions.
• Include keywords not found in the title or entered in the backend of your Amazon store.
• Never include links or references to your own online store or other retail outlets.
• Avoid promotional language like “sale,” “free shipping” or “special offer for Amazon shoppers.”

Keywords

To optimize the use of keywords in your Amazon product listing, start by conducting research to discover what keywords your target audience is searching for. This will help you avoid irrelevant keywords so you can get the best performance out of your product listing’s text. Here are some best practices:

• Conduct thorough keyword research focusing on product types, features, benefits and related terms.
• Aim for a balanced mix of relevant and high-volume keywords to optimize search ranking effectively.
• Use the most important keywords in your product titles and bullet points, and add any secondary keywords to the Search Terms fields in the backend of your Amazon store.
• Place less important keywords in Search Terms fields like Intended Use, Target Audience, and Subject Matter to enhance visibility.
• Make sure the keywords you add to Search Terms fields fit within the 250-byte limit and avoid repetition.

Product reviews

Strong verified reviews are another important component of Amazon product listing optimization. The key is to offer an excellent product and shopping experience in the first place. It also helps to use automated solutions to ensure you are consistently collecting customer reviews. Here are some best practices for optimizing your Amazon product reviews:

• Use automated review request tools and standard templates to collect as many reviews as possible.
• Never include customer reviews or testimonials in your product descriptions, as this is against Amazon’s guidelines (product reviews must appear in the “Product reviews” section only).
• Monitor and address negative or neutral reviews within Amazon’s guidelines. For example, if a customer accidentally submits seller feedback as a customer review, you can ask Amazon to remove it.

Automatically optimize your Amazon product listings with Channable

Looking for a more efficient way to optimize your Amazon product listings? With Channable’s complete Amazon API integration, you can easily integrate your product catalog with Amazon, optimize product listings, automate pricing, set conditional “if/then” rules for product listings and manage your Amazon orders directly from your own webshop:

• Keep your product listings up-to-date in real time.
• Meet Amazon’s listing requirements with our easy-to-use attribute builder.
• Optimize and enrich product listings to boost conversion.

Our Amazon API is part of our end-to-end marketplace solution. Manage thousands of listings across multiple marketplaces, all from a single, intuitive platform.

Sign up for your free trial today and discover the power of Channable’s end-to-end marketplace solution, streamlining every step of your product listing process, data analytics and optimization.