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When you sell on Amazon, you don’t stand  behind a counter or walk through aisles to give a quick product overview to visiting customers. There, the product description section of your listing will do this for you.

One consumer report suggests that customers find product content (description, images, etc) very important when buying online. This means a helpful product description can play an important role in boosting your sales.

In other words, how you write your Amazon product descriptions can make a difference between a sale and just a page visit. 

If you want to master the art of putting together Amazon product descriptions that sell, continue reading on. 

In this post, you’ll learn all you need to know about creating descriptions that do the trick.

What Is Amazon Product Description: A Quick Roundup and FAQs

An Amazon product description appears as a paragraph usually below-the-fold on the listing under the Product Information. This description is a text-only field where you can’t break paragraphs or use bullets. You have to write a single paragraph of up to 2000 characters (including spaces). 


What Is the Difference between an Amazon Product Description and Feature Bullets?


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Feature bullets and product description on a listing of a charging cable 

Before we start exploring Amazon product description guidelines, we need to clear up any confusion about what it actually is. An Amazon product description is not what you see on the right-hand side beside the product image on the listing. Amazon categorizes them as bullet points or features and they appear as About this item on the listing. 

Besides their placement on the listing, descriptions and feature bullets are different due to these reasons.

  • “Features” has a character limit of 500. Descriptions can be up to 2000 characters.
  • “Features” branches out into bullet points. Descriptions remain a single paragraph.
  • Descriptions are an expansion of features and summarize what the product is all about.

Can You Use HTML for Amazon Product Descriptions?

Not long ago, you could use HTML codes to create line breaks and bullet points in descriptions. From July 17, 2021, Amazon has stopped supporting HTML tags in product descriptions due to security reasons and for providing listing versatility to non-HTML devices.

Now, you can’t use HTML source code for crafting product descriptions and paste them into relevant sections on the listing. Amazon has clarified that the new, updated product description section will remain a text field where you can only use words in sentences and a paragraph to describe your product.

What You Can’t Write In Description

You may already know what to write in the description. But do you know what not to write? 

Here are some things that you need to steer clear of while writing your Amazon product descriptions. 

  • The existing condition of the product
  • Any type of quotes and reviews from Amazon or any other platform
  • The availability status and other related information
  • Any promotional stuff

Amazon asks sellers to put a description that helps customers understand the product. The above information snippets are more about your selling  details rather than the product itself. Amazon often takes down listings containing such  information. If you don’t want to risk losing your well-performing listings, refrain from adding the aforementioned details in your description.


After getting these basic rights, it’s time to hone your product description writing skills for standing out among the competition. You need to take into account these four Amazon product description best practices to cut above the rest.

Make Product Descriptions Customer-Centric

It is business 101 that a product and its promotion must be customer-centric. However, very few businesses are able to manage it that way. You will come across gazillions of listings where descriptions just boast about product features without factoring in who’s going to buy it and use it. 

Making the description of a product customer-centric is not that hard. All you need to do is tweak some wording to get desired results. Let’s look at a simple example of transforming a product-centric description into a customer-centric one. 

  • Product centric Statement: Excellent dust and waterproofing— IP68 water-resistant.
  • Customer-centric Statement: Ideal for outdoor use and swimming with IP68 dust and waterproof rating.

You can see how the rearrangement and addition of a few words have made product details customer-centric. With extensive market research before listing a product, you can easily come up with its customer-centric description. Even if a product is new to you as a seller, you can learn about it from buyers’ perspectives anytime. 

  • Google the product and skim through relevant articles/blog posts and customer reviews
  • Search Amazon marketplace for similar products from other sellers and see descriptions there. Also, look at what buyers are asking and saying about the product.
  • Watching a video or two on YouTube can also help you understand the product from the consumers’ viewpoint.

Keep the Description Simple

A product description should be as simple as possible. This important point is lost on so many sellers who cram their descriptions with stuff that make them less readable. For instance, there is no need to pack your descriptions with technical jargon, specifications, and numbers. Doing so will make your description just a difficult and boring text to read for most customers. 

Keep in mind that a large chunk of your customers are not specs freaks. Regular customers just want a simple description that can help them understand why they should buy and invest in a certain thing. Those interested in the technical details of a product can also refer to the specification column or user manual.  

While keeping descriptions simple, don’t snub all the technical details altogether. For instance, if you list a portable charging device/power bank, you must mention its mAh rating and charging time because almost every potential customer looks for these two basic specs. 

By writing a description that outlines common product features and how they are beneficial (by tying them to customer pain points), you can keep your Amazon product descriptions simple and convincing.

Go for A+ Content for Your Product



A portable mobile charger with A+ content— you can see how the product description section is adorned with enhanced product images, pictorial information grids, and assorted text. 

Do you feel that a 2000-character (around 300-400 words) text product description is not good enough when you have a story to tell about your product or brand? You’re probably right. There is no way to have compelling storytelling without visual content and assorted text boxes on Amazon listings. But unfortunately, the regular product description section doesn’t allow it.

You can get around this constraint if you are eligible to add A+ Content to your product descriptions. Previously known as Enhanced Brand Content, A+ Content lets you add high-definition images and unique text placements to tell brand and product stories without hitting any snag. 

Augmenting your listing with A+ content is always a recipe for higher traffic and good conversion rates. These are essentially two groups of sellers that can pretty up descriptions on their Amazon listings with A+ content. 

  • Sellers who have passed the approval process of Amazon Brand Registry.
  • Aspiring sellers and brand owners who are part of Amazon Exclusives or Launchpad

If you want to leverage the A+ Content feature for your listing, you must fulfill either of these criteria. You can’t just buy this feature by paying a certain fee. Also, the qualified sellers can’t just use A+ Content for any of their products. Only products that are part of their approved brand catalog can get A+ Content in their descriptions. 

“Optimize” Your Descriptions to Make Them Great

For the longest time, the term “optimization” would be associated with Google rankings. With Amazon’s search bar becoming a default search engine for many shoppers (44% of them directly go to Amazon instead of using Google), as a seller, you have to now optimize your product’s listing as well. 

Just like Google, optimization helps a seller rank higher on Amazon Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords. Amazon has developed and deployed the A9 algorithm. It uses different variables to determine the product ranks for relevant search queries. 

From the product title to key features and descriptions, you need to optimize everything on your listing. Since we’re talking about product descriptions here, we’ll keep our focus only on their optimization. 

You need to do these two things to optimize your product descriptions. 

  1. Expand on Product Details

If a visitor has ended up on the product description section of the listing, it indicates that they have walked past the title, images, and bullet features. In other words, it shows they are interested in the given product and want to get some additional information. 

This is why descriptions should always be an extension of your product bullet points. There is no harm in reiterating some of the features in the description. However, just paraphrasing bullet features in product descriptions won’t be a wise move.

Customers expect something more than what they’ve seen in bullet features. So, you’ve to give it to them. A product description packed with relevant information can turn out to be a finishing touch in converting a quality lead into a sale.

  1. Intelligently Integrate Selected Keywords

The logical and contextual use of selected keywords also helps in optimizing a product description. Make sure you don’t go overboard with keyword usage. It can lead to sloppy writing that can do more harm than good to your Amazon product description optimization efforts.

Amazon Product Description SEO and A9 Algorithm

The A9 algorithm uses various metrics to decide product ranks. Among them, Click-To-Sales (CTS) rate and Sales Page Content work in tandem. CTS rate tells the number of clicks that eventually lead to sales. The algorithm uses this rate to decide where a product should rank for certain keywords. The higher the CTS rate, the better the ranking. 

By writing an informational product description that complements feature bullets, you increase the likelihood of a sale. In other words, better descriptions can lead to a higher CTS rate and better ranking.

Sales Page Content signals Amazon about the relevance of a listing for a particular search query by taking into account its total volume of keywords. You can use this effective tool to get the list of the most relevant rank-worthy keywords for your products. By intelligently using keywords in every component of the Amazon listing including the description column, you can easily improve the Sales Page Content signals for the given listing.

With keyword optimization, your listing can rank on the first page, resulting in more visits. Subsequently, informative and persuasive descriptions can let you convert more clicks into sales. This will increase your CTS rate and give your listing an extended run on the first-page search results for the relevant keywords. 

That’s how this optimization process works and yields results. 

Things to Avoid While Writing Amazon Product Descriptions

Before we wrap up this piece, here are some things you should always avoid while writing Amazon product descriptions. 

Copy-Pasting

You might come across a killer description of the same article from a competitor. Don’t tempt into plagiarizing it for your listing. Not just is it unethical, you can also get into trouble with Amazon. The platform takes copyright trademark infringements very seriously.  

Product Description Generator

Using an AI-powered product description generator is always a bad idea. You will be able to fill the description section using those generators. However, those descriptions won’t hit the spot like the one crafted by a good copywriter/editor who also knows about the product in depth.

Superlatives and Overselling

Overselling might still work in conventional one-on-one sales where sellers go over the top in describing their products. These tactics certainly don’t work on online platforms including Amazon. If you write a summary that is only talking about the supreme and flawless nature of the product rather than providing useful information, it’s not going to work.  

Our Listing Optimizer Can Help You Ace Amazon Product Descriptions!

ZonGuru offers a listing optimizer tool that makes sure you always end up on the first page of relevant Amazon SERPs. It can particularly help you in crafting better descriptions with its keyword matching feature. 

If you want to see how your keyword matches with any content in the listing (including descriptions), use the ZonGuru Listing Optimizer tool. This will also allow you to determine the potential performance of your keyword list on the Amazon SERPs and sort them out.

Get a quick free demo of our Listing Optimizer right now. If you want to further assess the tool and other features of ZonGuru’s seller toolkit, sign up for a 7-day free trial now!


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