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To succeed as an Amazon seller, you must follow Amazon's product description guidelines. Learn what they are and how to write product descriptions that sell!
In 2021, Amazon did well over $450 billion worth of retail e-commerce sales worldwide. And thanks to the Amazon Business Seller Program and Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), millions of sellers have claimed their slice of the pie and built profitable businesses via this behemoth marketplace.
But still, succeeding in such a crowded arena has its challenges, one of them being writing product descriptions that sell. What does it take? To find out, let’s go over Amazon’s guidelines, along with some best practices and other key info that you’ll find helpful.
As you know, product detail pages are home to all the info a consumer needs to learn about and feel comfortable with, before buying your product. That includes your product names/titles, images, customer reviews, and, of course, descriptions.
What are Amazon’s guidelines for product descriptions? To name a handful, they must:
Of course, to fare well in the Amazon marketplace, your listings have to be active. So it’s worth reading the full product detail page guidelines to avoid having them removed for violations.
That said, these guidelines aren’t the only things you need to know to drive sales. It’s also essential to be informed about: 1) Amazon’s SEO algorithm, 2) how to choose keywords and optimize for them so that your products get seen by the right people, and 3) how to turn visitors into customers.
Just like there are many competing brands in Google’s search results, there are commonly hundreds of products on Amazon’s search engine results pages. Can you imagine how time-consuming it’d be as a shopper to have to sift through them manually to find the most relevant products? Thanks to the A9 algorithm, which decides in an instant what products to show first, so you (and your target customers) don’t have to!
A9 weighs numerous ranking factors but three that are directly related to your product descriptions are:
That last point—keyword relevance—brings us to an important step that must take place before you dive into writing your next description.
To give your Amazon listing the best chance of showing up in relevant search results, take cues from what relevant keywords are currently performing well in your product category. For example, let's say that you sell theft-proof luggage and typed the search term “theft-proof luggage'' into Amazon’s search bar. What would the search results reveal about the keywords potential customers are searching for?
Notice that the top-ranking products—all of which have been purchased hundreds of times over—include the keyword “anti-theft” in their titles instead of “theft-proof.” This would be a clue that “anti-theft” is a more commonly searched term and one that you may want to target.
All in all, your keyword research process may look something like this:
This will give you a good foundation for ranking high up in Amazon’s search engine results pages. And a well-written description can build on that foundation and improve your sales dramatically.
The most effective Amazon product descriptions typically have 5 things in common—they use the following best practices.
One of the top rules for copywriting (including product description writing is this: Know your audience. If you don’t, how can you know what to say to predictably generate sales? You’ll just be doing trial and error, costing yourself hundreds of potential customers now and in the future. That’s why it’s important to have well-researched buyer personas for each of your ideal customers and to write for those personas specifically.
This means including search terms they would use to search your product, highlighting how your product helps them to achieve their goals or solves a problem they face, and doing it all in language that they use and can understand. To see how this is done, check out the description for TurboTax Deluxe 2020.
It’s buyer-centric in that it:
If you use a similar approach, it will increase your chances of showing up in relevant search results and increase your conversion rate.
Briefly mentioned above was the importance of explaining how your product helps solve a problem or reach a goal. When browsing through Amazon product descriptions, potential customers are judging whether or not the results are aligned with the end goals they’re after.
So, if you forget to talk about those end results in favor of only listing product features, you’ll be in trouble. While it’s beneficial to explain what your product does or has, to get a complete picture, consumers primarily need to understand the most desirable outcomes those features produce.
You don’t need to use every last character allowed in your description to sell your products successfully. Longer descriptions aren’t synonymous with more effective descriptions. And neither is copy that goes into detail about every feature and benefit—large and small.
The ultimate goal is to highlight the main features that lead to the top outcomes your target customers care about. That information is what’s going to persuade people into buying from you; not the million other minute details you could add. While most product descriptions aren’t quite this short, the description for Fitbit’s Ace 3 Activity Tracker drives home the point.
Given that the other elements on its product detail page give additional product info, the actual product description is only needed to reiterate a few main points. These are:
This brief description is effective! The product is the #6 Best Seller in the Fitness & Activity Monitors category, has been rated by over 1,100 people, and bought by who knows how many more. Being concise works!
Being concise is important in making sure that every word you use has meaning. It’s easy to take shortcuts by claiming that you have “the best” product, a “high-quality” product, a “durable” product, etc. But these adjectives are so overused that they’re pretty much meaningless.
Instead of making such claims without any evidence to back them up, show how your products are durable or high-quality or whatever you claim they are. Have they been proven to last longer than products from competitors? Do you use patented technology to get better outcomes for users? Specific details such as these, when linked to the big benefits your target customers want, will serve you better than empty adjectives.
In addition to packing your descriptions with meaning and getting straight to your biggest selling points, you must make sure that your descriptions are easy to read. If your descriptions are massive walls of text, very few potential customers will take the time to sift through them. The majority will quickly move on to other products with easily digestible descriptions.
This is why it’s important to use bullet points when you can and to break chunks of text up into paragraphs of a few sentences each. Amazon itself shows how this is done with the description for its Fire TV Stick 4K, which uses white space, short paragraphs, and images to prevent the text from looking cluttered and overwhelming.
The best practices above are meant to make your Amazon product listings as persuasive as they can be, helping you earn more customers. But did you know that you can also make the process of writing them at scale faster?
With Jasper’s templates, you can crank out optimized descriptions for your Amazon product pages in minutes. For example, two obvious favorites are the Amazon Product Description (Paragraphs) template and the Amazon Product Features (Bullets) template. How do they work?
In the Amazon Product Description template, simply enter your product name, product info, and a desired tone of voice.
Jasper will do the rest, generating paragraphs that expand upon the information you entered. Can you see how this would save you a ton of time, especially if you’re writing descriptions for a large catalog of products?
And what about the Amazon Product Features (Bullets) template? Enter:
You’d then get a variety of bulleted lists to choose from. They can be used as-is or combined and tweaked to create one comprehensive, cohesive list of bullet points.
And the same basic process also applies to other Jasper templates including:
Want to learn how to use these and other templates like a pro, save yourself a ton of time, and sell more effectively? Then, Jasper Bootcamp will be right up your alley since it covers how Jasper thinks so that you can get the best content possible out of him. Dig into the training today and sign up for Jasper to start generating high-converting Amazon product descriptions today!
Austin Distel is the Sr. Director of Marketing at Jasper, your AI creative assistant. He's also an Airbnb superhost in Austin, Texas. You can follow Austin's adventures around the internet and the world at distel.com.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.