Amazon UK are to limit product titles to no more than 200 characters (including spaces) from the 6th of April. We’ve already seen this in the US on Amazon.com but now the shorter title limitation is coming to Amazon’s EU sites.
Chris Dunne over at RepricerExpress warns that this will impact existing listings as well as any new listings added after the deadline. Listings with titles containing more than 200 characters will be suppressed from search results and potential customers simply won’t see your products.
This is especially important if you sell your own brand products as you’re probably the only merchant so none of your competitors will try to fix the title. However if you have a well performing product on an ASIN where other merchants also list then it’s in your interest to edit the title. If someone else does the edit first then keywords may be deleted, if you do the job at least you have a fighting chance of your new version becoming the default.
How to identify titles on Amazon that need fixing
Amazon advise that you either:
1. Sellers should 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
or
1. Sellers should log into Seller Central and click on “Manage Inventory” under “Inventory”.
2. Click on “Suppressed ASINs”, then filter according to title.
2 Responses
I dream of the day when ebay will give us a 200 character title limit! Descriptions would no longer be required. With all the “item specific”, “condition”, “12 image limit”, “category”, and every other list drop down and character window ebay provide that sellers have to complete, if a seller cannot describe their item in the “description” window within 200 characters then they are a windbag!
Amazon are constantly changing the goalposts – the recommended guidelines suggest keeping titles to 100 characters as this is actually visually better and keeps things more relevant instead of spamming a title.
Over the last couple of years we’ve seen guidelines from Amazon, then we contact Seller Support and they say the opposite, so I don’t think everyone is on the same page.
We have also noted a change recently – the keyword fields on Amazon used to be limited to 50 characters but have now been upped to 1000 characters. Again this was a struggle to confirm because there was no announcement and none of the Seller Support representatives were aware of the change.