What a journey it has been! Way back in 2014, I opened a case with Seller Central to alert them that Add-A-Product was delivering misleading information. In 2015, I wrote a blog post stating I was elated that changes were underway to correct the contradictory details. In 2016, I reported that some progress had been made, but we weren’t done yet. The “done” part would take another year!
While there are multiple problems with the title TOS throughout all of Amazon, the biggest concern I had was that the Add-A-Product dashboard was informing sellers they had a legal character count of 250 when anything over 200 would cause Amazon’s suppression rule to kick in and demote their listings in the search results.
Here’s a brief overview in case you weren’t aware of that policy:
According to Amazon (in the email from July of 2015 and Seller Support messages from recently), any title in any category that is over 200 characters will be suppressed from the search results. Please note: It doesn’t say “removed” from the search results — it says “suppressed” (stifled, censored, buried).
Today, however, there was dancing in the hallways of the Marketing Words’ office! I received an answer to yet another case I’d opened in Seller Central and read (with enormous glee) the following sentence:
“However, the most recent changes have been added to the
seller central > add a product interface and the system will
throw an error and populate error message
if it’s not meeting any of the style guideline.”
What?! Really?! I quickly opened a browser and – as fast as my little fingers would type – clicked over to Seller Central and began a bit of light testing. Yes! It IS true! (At least in the categories I viewed.) The system does, in fact, give an error message if your title exceeds 200 characters. Yay!
No more going one character over and having your listing accidently suppressed.
No more bewilderment about why you can’t gain any ground in the rankings when everything seems to be OK.
Here are a handful of screenshots from the Home, Pets, Arts & Crafts and Baby categories/subcategories.
I’d love it if you’d check the categories you sell in and report back in the comments section below. Are you seeing the same thing?
If you’ve been having issues getting a listing to rank, check the title character count. If you’re even one character over the 200-character limit, that could be the issue.
Thank you, Amazon!
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Thank you for this post Karon!! You’re amazing. This helps me a ton.
You are most welcome! I’m elated that Amazon finally made this change. Will have a lot of seller a bunch of headaches in the future.
It’s showing the alert in the Health/Personal Care and Beauty categories.
Great! Thanks for reporting in.
Does this mean the title rules in the Style Guides no longer matter e.g. 50 characters in health and personal care?
If the Style Guide is still relevant then this doesnt seem to clear up the confusion.
The title TOS in the Style Guides still matter. However, if you have a title character count of 50 or 80 or 100, you never had a chance of having the suppression rule harm your listing because it doesn’t kick in until you exceed 200 characters. It clears up confusion for those that the suppression rule applied to.
Toys & Games > Sports & Outdoor Play > Slumber Bags > Slumber Bags – 200 characters is the limit; however, the error is different. It just says ‘ Product Name : The value specified is invalid.’ Also, Amazon bug when you hover over the ‘i’ information it says ‘Max. 250 characters. However, it is actually 200 because you will receive that error is anything over 200 characters.
Thanks for reporting in. It’s not a glitch. It’s been that way forever. Amazon has tons of conflicting information on their site. It would help get things straightened out more quickly if sellers would contact Seller Central reps and tell them that the max says 250 (which would cause your listing to be suppressed because of the suppression rule) and the error won’t let you go past 200 (which is a good thing!).