Not sure how to get your listing up and running on Amazon? This short guide will give you the essentials about Amazon Product Listings.
March 31, 2022
New to selling on Amazon? You may be wondering what product listings are, how to make them, and why they matter. You’re in the right place! This short overview will teach you everything you need to know about an Amazon product listing.
Introduction & Guidelines to Create an Amazon Product Listing
An Amazon Product Listing is the page where you showcase any given product with the key product features that you are selling on Amazon and where customers can purchase your item. It’s a more complicated way to say “product detail page” or something of the like. Every product you sell has its own unique listing page and is different from your brand page or storefront (which showcases your brand as a whole and all the items available through your brand).
This helpful image from Amazon shows what a basic listing might look like.
Every listing includes the following:
- Title
- Product Images
- Variations
- Bullet Point
- Buy Box
- Competitor Items
- Description
Included on the listing page are also other elements such as customer reviews, customer questions, product details, important information, Amazon A+ Content, and sponsored ads. The most important and basic elements of a listing, however, are the 7 listed above.
Preparing Your Store
Before you can even get started with a listing, you have to make sure your store is ready to go. To do this, you need to visit Seller Central and pick a selling plan. Amazon has two plans: the Individual Plan and the Professional Plan. With the former, you’ll pay $0.99 every time you make a sale. With the latter, you’ll pay a flat fee of $39.99 a month, regardless of how many sales you make - of course with some other fees and royalties mixed in there. You can check out the total pricing breakdown here.
Once you’ve picked a plan, you should consider how you want to sell on Amazon. Do you want to create your own branded product or private label product? Resell an existing product? Sell handmade items? Use FBA? Choose how you want to sell and what you want to sell. It’s important to note that before you can create your Amazon Seller Central account, you’ll need the following:
- Business email
- Internationally chargeable credit card
- Tax information
- Government ID
- Business bank account (try to avoid using your own personal)
- Phone number
This is only the beginning of the process. Before you’re ready to create your first listing, you have to go through the legwork of product research, supplier communications, marketing asset acquisition & branding, and packaging solutions. This isn’t easy - if you need a little help along the way, consider our FBA Academy for step-by-step guidance through the process.
Creating Your Listing
Assuming you’re adequately prepared to start selling your item on Amazon (ie, you’ve completed the aforementioned steps), now it’s time to create your listing. The good news is that this step is not complicated!
There are some background details you’ll need to include:
- Product categories
- Offer details (price, condition, available quantity, shipping details)
- Product identifier (GTIN, UPC, ISBN, EAN)
- SKU (you create this to track inventory)
- Backend keywords & search terms
These are relatively easy to find or create. What takes the most work is the listing details we mentioned earlier. Here are a few tips quicks on how to master those elements that you can edit.
Title
Your product title can be up to 200 characters. All words must start with a capital letter. You want to maximize your title by including all of your seed keywords and by thoroughly and completely describing your product. Use as many characters as possible to maximize SEO while still sounding natural.
Images
Every listing should have at least 5 product images - all of which need to be HD and professionally produced. These images can be 500 x 500 or 1,000 x 1,000 pixels - but it’s best to check with Amazon’s latest guidelines surrounding images to be sure you’re on the right page. Every listing needs a hero image taken on a non-distracting white background, an infographic to highlight key features of the product, and lifestyle images to help customers visualize themselves using the product. You can find more help regarding product imagery here.
Variations
If you don’t have variations available, you don’t need to worry about this portion of the listing. If you are offering your product in multiple colors or patterns, however, you must prepare yourself accordingly. You’ll need product imagery for each of these variations, as well as accurate reporting on the available quantity to ship for each variation. 3D Renders can be very helpful in obtaining the imagery necessary for these variations, as a way to avoid photographing multiple products.
Bullet Points
These short sentences should highlight the key features of your product and help your customer see what problem your product is solving for them. Be sure to optimize these bullet points with relevant keywords - every part of your listing needs to be optimized! Assume that most readers will skim over these bullet points. You want them to be interesting enough that those who read them are intrigued enough to keep reading the rest of your listing.
Description
Your description can be much longer and is a great place to continue to insert relevant keywords and boost your organic traffic potential. Be sure that you review your description - it should sound natural, informative, engaging, and concise. You don’t want to write an essay, but you also don’t want to miss out on SEO potential by skimping here. Fill it out well, but don’t overdo it. And always, always, ALWAYS properly perform keyword research and use them to do so.
Other Parts of Your Listing
There are portions of your listing you don’t have control over - the Buy Box, customer reviews, and customer questions to name a few. While you can’t entirely control these parts of your listing, you can do your best to ensure that you have positive reviews by creating quality listings and delivering a consistent, valuable experience to your customers.
You can also do your best to ensure that the question and answer portion of your listing is helpful to future customers by actively answering any questions that arise there. Don’t leave it to other customers to answer - engage with the concerns your customers and potential customers have. When you do this, answer them like a normal human - don’t just write in a prepackaged answer that sounds like you took the fine print off the back of your product packaging and slapped it on the FAQ section. Your customers want to engage with you - not a robot.
The Buy Box is something you want to maintain control over at all times, but it can be hard to do so. This is a topic worthy of its own article…and lucky you, we actually have a few right here!
You should also keep in mind that an Amazon listing is hardly plug-and-play. You will need to routinely make modifications and adjustments as trends change and your customer base changes along with them. Keep coming back and updating your keywords, imagery, and verbiage to stay relevant and consistent with the consumer base!
Conclusion
Getting your listing off the ground requires a lot of leg work at the start. There’s a ton of research that goes into selling on Amazon! Once you’ve completed that leg work, however, the actual process of getting your listing published is not too difficult, but there are Amazon product listing services out there. Every image should be crisp and professionally taken, and every place where copy is involved should be optimized with well-researched keywords. Keep these things in mind, and you’re well on your way to success!
Julia Grant
Julia Grant is a copywriter specializing in e-commerce and small business, helping businesses expand their reach with copy that clearly communicates their message and converts. She is a certified translator and interpreter and prides herself on providing culturally relevant content in both English and Spanish.
See more posts from this author