Starting from July 15th, Amazon will start demoting new item titles that exceed 200 characters in search.
In a blog post from SellerLabs called Optimize Your Titles Before Amazon Suppresses Them they talk about these new rules.
As they say: “An email was sent yesterday, June 16, 2015, proclaiming the new standard for product titles. Current titles with 200 characters or more will still be listed in searches but “The titles may be shortened by Amazon to meet this criteria,” Amazon said in the email. We’re assuming this applies to titles in every category but aren’t 100 percent sure. We do know Amazon has suggested 50- to 100-character titles in the past for its various categories. But it’s safe to say long titles overall are bad for business.”
Amazon advises that you amend your longer titles and here’s how:
1. Log into Seller Central and click on Manage Inventory under Inventory
2. Click on Suppressed ASINs, then filter according to title
3. Shorten the ASIN title to less than 200 characters and save changes
Or
1. Log into Seller Central and click on Inventory Reports under Manage Inventory
2. Download the Listing Quality and Suppressed Listing Report, and filter the listings according to Product Name
3. Re-submit the ASINs with a product name length of less than 200 characters through an inventory template
I’m not clear whether this is a global change or just applicable in the US for now. But in any case, what starts stateside comes over the Atlantic in no time.
Will this affect your Amazon sales?
4 Responses
This is a good thing, seen so many titles stuffed full of keywords and things that have nothing to do with the product such as ‘free delivery’. Hopefully a start of trying to tidy up asins and this could also be caused by the introduction of Chinese sellers who do this a lot.
I have just had a reply to my support ticket with my Amazon.com (US) manager. She stated the following:
This will only affect new ASINs. I believe it will only affect the US marketplace.
I have been trying to get some clarification if this will also affect Euro Amazon sites. If anyone can clarify that would be great.
Thats what I suspected and unlike eBay they don’t give you 6 months to get your house in order.