Amazon rejects listings and suppresses copy for reasons that have nothing to do with how good your product is. Most of it comes down to two things: staying inside the character limits, and not including the stuff Amazon flat-out bans. Get those right and you can spend your energy on the part that actually converts.
The character limits, in one place
- Title: up to 200 characters
- Key feature bullets: roughly 500 characters each
- Product description: up to 2,000 characters
Treat these as ceilings, not targets. Prioritize clarity over filling every character. A tight 1,200-character description that a shopper actually reads beats a 2,000-character wall they bounce off.
What Amazon does not allow in a description
This is where listings quietly get flagged. Amazon prohibits:
- Prices or pricing claims
- Seller contact details
- External URLs or references to other websites
- References to customer reviews ("our 5-star product...")
- Promotional language like "sale" or "free shipping"
- HTML, JavaScript, or any code
One nuance worth knowing: plain HTML tags are not allowed, but line breaks are. So you can separate paragraphs, you just cannot style them with markup.
A structure that matches how people actually shop
Shoppers skim first, read second. So write for the skim:
- A short benefit paragraph up top. Lead with the outcome, not the spec.
- Scannable bullets underneath for the key features.
The pattern I use in every bullet: lead with the benefit, back it with the feature. "Stays cold for 24 hours thanks to double-wall vacuum insulation" beats "Double-wall vacuum insulation." Same fact, but the first one tells the buyer why they care before it tells them how it works.
Cover the questions before they are asked
The descriptions that convert answer the buyer's silent objections: materials, dimensions, use cases, and what makes this one different from the near-identical listing next to it. Write those in plain language. If someone has to re-read a sentence, you have already lost them.
Skip the keyword stuffing
Cramming search terms reads badly to humans and can breach Amazon's listing rules. Write for the person, mention the obvious terms naturally, and let the structured fields do the keyword work.
The quick pre-publish check
- Title under 200 characters
- No prices, links, contact info, or review mentions
- No HTML, only line breaks
- Every bullet: benefit first, feature second
- Reads clean out loud
Writing that first draft is the slow part. If you want a head start, AI Product Description generates a compliant, benefit-led draft from your product details that you can then tighten by hand.
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