Did you know that nearly 70 percent of Amazon’s customers shop via a mobile device? Consumers clearly love making use of their time during commutes or before turning in at night to stock their pantries and get that last-minute gift out to Nana across the country.
This is why we emphasize the importance of optimizing your listing for mobile shoppers. Not doing this means you are ignoring over half of your potential customers.
The question is: Is your product listing configured for reading on these smaller devices?
To ensure that your product listing is reader friendly on smartphones and tablets, we recommend the “KISS” rule. That is: “Keep It Short & Sweet”. The entire listing and back-end fields are all indexed for search. That means there is no good reason to keyword stuff your title or bullet points by using as much “real estate” as possible.
In fact, if your bullet points are too long, not only will shoppers scroll past them once you hit the optimized character limit, additional characters may not be indexed for search at all.
Consumer attention span today is much shorter than your mother’s, or maybe even yours. They want to be spoon-fed the particulars in a handful of words or 30-second sound bites. This is perfect for shopping by mobile device.
If your title or bullet points are too long, though, your potential buyer won’t read all of your product’s important features. Those will be clipped in the transition to mobile device.
The frustrated or bored shopper will click away to another seller’s listing, costing you a sale and increasing your bounce rate. (When someone uses a search term to find your listing, looks at it and then clicks away without buying, Amazon begins to mark your listing as “not relevant” to that search term, and you lose views.)
For the “KISS” rule, we believe that product listing titles should be no more than 150 characters (including spaces). For bullet points we aim to stick to 200 characters or less. If you’ve never looked at your listing on a smartphone, do so. You’ll see that even with these guidelines in play, only the first three bullets appear without the shopper having to click deeper into the listing.
For that reason, we recommend that you give careful consideration to your product’s three most compelling attributes and order them appropriately. Shoppers already know about Amazon’s stellar return policy so don’t waste space mentioning this. Instead, talk about your product’s important benefits first (rust resistance; vast color selection; compact portability; etc.).
Finally, for the standard product description, go the extra mile to add light HTML (paragraph breaks and bold headlines). This makes your description more eye-catching as well as more readable by sectioning your description into those more easily digestible pieces.
Although that is a 2,000-character field, the addition of the HTML coding will reduce your readable count to about 1,750 characters (again, including spaces).
Whatever keywords you don’t manage to fit into these 3 product listing sections, simply add them to those back-end search fields. Your listing will look infinitely clearer, more concise and professional, keeping shoppers on your page and converting to more sales.