Amazon’s new headline policy
Recently, Amazon has made new rule adjustments for product titles, such as the product name can’t be more than 200 characters (including spaces), can’t use some special characters, and can’t have repeated words.
If the above misuse occurs and does not meet the requirements of the new policy, Amazon officials will give advice on modification, and sellers need to complete the modification in accordance with the new requirements within 14 days. If there is no timely modification of what will happen, the Amazon official did not make it clear in the announcement.
The title is an important part of the Listing, perhaps the previous requirements are too loose, sellers in the product title is often too long or too complex, resulting in poor consumer experience. Some sellers believe that Amazon operators need to pay attention to this adjustment in time after the adjustment, especially the platform to give advice on modification, otherwise it may be downgraded. At the same time, some sellers also pointed out that if there are many products in the existing goods, the title of the product has been suggested by the platform, it will have to spend a lot of time and energy on modifying the title above.
The New Deal for Amazon Titles
Product title is an important factor to decide whether buyers will order or not, if buyers search for the product, they hope to get enough information from the product title, including brand, model, size, quantity, color and so on. Therefore, sellers usually put as much key information about the product in the title as possible to attract buyers, and also optimize the title with SEO search.
According to the seller’s tip, the Amazon announcement said that it will update its product title policy in order to standardize product information and improve the shopping experience on Amazon.com.
Amazon says it found that some item names were becoming longer and sometimes contained redundant words or characters, which Amazon believes can reduce buyer confidence in shopping. The new policy on titles helps ensure that item names are clear, concise and uniform. The new policy includes the following points:
- for most product categories, product names may not exceed 200 characters (including spaces).
- No special characters ! , $, ? , _, {, }, ^, ¬ and |, unless these characters are part of the brand name.
- There should be no repetition of words in trade names. Prepositions, articles and conjunctions are excluded.
It is understood that the new requirements will take effect on January 21, 2025. If a seller’s trade name does not meet the above requirements, Amazon advises sellers to update it in time. Starting January 21st, all item name changes will be subject to the updated policy, and sellers will be able to view and fix any non-compliant item names in Manage All Inventory.
Additionally, Amazon will provide brand owners with suggestions for adjusting non-compliant trade names in the View Product Information update. Brand owners have 14 days to act on the recommendations. These recommendations will be rolled out gradually. During this process, sellers’ items will remain on-sale and will still be able to edit the trade name, provided the change meets the new policy requirements.
Confusion from sellers
The product title is a very important part of the product listing and is key to attracting buyers to click and learn about the product features. Generally speaking, when sellers optimize the title, the length will be controlled between 80-160 characters. The new policy clearly requires that it should be within 200 characters, which is actually able to meet the operational needs of sellers.
However, the title of the new policy has attracted a lot of discussion and questions from sellers, who believe that this policy has shortcomings.
First, for sellers with a huge number of products, the new title policy will increase their operational pressure.
“Most sellers have thousands of product information! Now have to worry about combing through tons of merchandise information in just 14 days or they will be suppressed or incorrectly changed. This should only apply to unlisted item information. I have tried to update some of the merchandise messages but they are locked and uneditable. It could actually state that there should be no more than 3 repeating words as variants usually repeat a word as would be added to the end of the new subheading.” One seller stated.
Another seller pointed out that according to the new regulations, is it true that all old product names need to be changed?Can the Amazon system guarantee the stability of links while receiving link change operations?
Secondly, such a large number of simultaneous modification of the title, Amazon’s system in the receipt of link change operation at the same time, can guarantee the stability of the link. What will happen if the system is overloaded and the server crashes? Who will bear the loss? As when the Consumer Bill required sellers to verify store information, after months of adjustment, the Amazon system was stabilized, but sellers delayed a lot of time and energy due to verification issues.
Third, the definition can be more detailed about the words that cannot be repeated in the product name. Currently, prepositions, articles, conjunctions are excluded, but some sellers believe that this definition is too broad. What if the brand name is something like “Magic Mirror Magic Mirror” or “One Plus One” or many other names with repeated words?
Furthermore, if sellers don’t see the announcement in time, or fail to change all the titles within 14 days, will the links be suspended or the store downgraded? Currently the announcement does not specify the possible impact or penalties.
For sellers concerned about these issues and points of contention, the current Amazon official has not yet given a reply. As the new policy on titles has not yet been implemented, Amazon’s detailed new rules for titles are not yet clear, and sellers are advised to pay attention to the background dynamics in the near future.
When it comes to Listing requirements, Amazon had a major overhaul in 2024, when new requirements were put in place for merchandise bullet points, such as restrictions on special characters, emojis, and some phrases (e.g., money-back related guarantees). Special characters such as ™, ®, €, …, +, ≠, 0, in, £, ¥, ©, ±, ~, â and any other emojis are not allowed to be used in sub ah merchandise descriptions, and eco-friendly, environmentally friendly, anti-microbial, antimicrobial, made of bamboo, containing bamboo, made of soy, containing soy, and so on, are all prohibited phrases.
And, in addition to the existing review process, Amazon said it will also use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to help sellers optimize the quality of commodity information, Amazon will put the heavy burden of detecting commodity descriptions on AI tools. Whether Amazon will use AI tools to help sellers optimize titles at a later stage with this new title policy is also unknown at this time.
