Avoid Having Your Amazon Listings Being Inactive and Blocked
We have been hearing a lot of complaints from Merchants whose Amazon listings are blocked. If you are looking at something like this in your seller central inventory view. It means for some reason that item is blocked on Amazon.
It may be that you are not eligible to list that item or some sort of issue in your listing notes, description, images etc. What we have seen a lot of lately is Amazon cracking down on Title Length. It seems they are getting pretty tired of spammy keyword titles. Without warning, Amazon has been suppressing listings that do not meet their style guidelines.
For the item in question, this is the response that Amazon came back with when asked why the listing was blocked.
In this case the reason why your items are block is because of the title, in order to correct this situation you have to fix the titles using the link listed below, from page 4 to page 6.
The doc they gave was a style guide that had some pretty good guidelines for Amazon listings in the Home and Garden category. It specifically states Amazon titles in the category should be limited to 100 characters. It’s common to see listings with titles stuffed full of more than 300 characters trying to rank for as many keywords as possible. Amazon has always encouraged simple titles but it seems they are now enforcing them.
Below is screen shot from the style guide for the Home and Garden category. Notice the the title length.
The funny thing is different categories have different Title limits. Many are 50 characters and some are 100. Not all are enforced and we are not sure what the real limits are. We know what is in the style guide and that is the safest bet.
So what if your listings have super long titles and they are not suppressed? You could just leave it alone and hope that nothing happens. Worst case, you probably loose a couple days of sales while your listing is suppressed. A better approach may be to move most of those keywords into your bullet points and the description. Many people don’t really understand keywords and they try to target too many. We are currently doing extensive research in Amazon search optimization and will be releasing products to help you target the correct keywords and solve this issue for good!
Brandon is one of the co-founders, CEO, and main data geek for Seller Labs. He started Seller Labs after finding no other tools that could provide the flexibility needed for his used-book business. He no longer sells online, but now guides Seller Labs as the lead innovator to make sure that our products remain on the cutting edge.
