Check It Before You List It

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

~Ben Franklin

It just came down the Amazon email pipe that sellers are expected to clean up listings by the end of the month. Listings lacking Key Features (bullet points), descriptions, and images with pure white backgrounds will be suppressed.

I don't blame them. Really.

Have you seen the listings with absolutely no description? Or the listing with products sitting on someone's bed? This isn't Ebay, people!

What a pain in the rear it's going to be to make sure your listings don't get suppressed -especially if A) you didn't make the original listing, and B) you don't have the product because it's sitting in Amazon's warehouse.  We will have to do the best we can with these new demands, but what about the future?

I confess that I haven't spent a lot of time paying attention to the details of a listing (except for the ones I create). My bad. I'm going to change my habits beginning now. When I enter the product UPC code into "Add a Product", I always click over to look at price, number of sellers, and rank to determine my own price, but I've kind of ignored bad pictures and descriptions. Who has time for all of that?

Well, I don't have the time or resources to go backwards, so I had  better start paying attention.

Join me and pledge that on this day forward:

1. Check the weight of the product. If the weight is incorrect, take a picture of the product on your scale and send it to Seller Central. I did that yesterday, and they corrected a listing with the weight listed at 4 lbs. when it was actually less than 2 lbs.
2. Check the Key Features to make sure everything is included, and that they are written in an appealing way. Check capitalization, spelling, and punctuation as well. I've noticed some serious errors on a number of listings.
3. Read the description. Is it clear? Is it appealing? Is it factual? Does it include all of the important details?
4. Check the title. Does it use the best words to describe the product? Does it include the quantity if there is more than one? (I fixed my own listing today. I didn't think to put "2 Pack"  in the title on a multipack listing that I created.). If it's a bundle, then does it include the number of items (bundle of # items), and list of all of the items in the title AND the Key Features?
5. Check the image. If it sucks, then get out your camera. Images should have a pure white background.

Read through every listing that you list against, and submit changes to Seller Central before you put the product into the box. I want the listing to be correct by the time my products reach the fulfillment center. If every seller would do this before listing, we could help clean up the catalog, and possibly save our product listing from suppression (which sounds depressing).