Tried searching but couldn’t find anything on this.
Does anyone know why the bullet point limit is 500 characters in a flat file but if you just individually edit a listing in seller central it is 700 characters?
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It’s Amazon … right hand doesn’t talk to the left hand type thing.
We have seen in the past that Amazon makes changes to the excel file before those changes make it to the Manage Inventory Edit pages or to the Help page explanations.
The excel files seem to be the testing / playing ground … and we think Amazon is letting their AI play around with both.
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Just to ask the stoopid question, are you sure that both numbers are measuring characters?
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Yes hah.
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Here is Amazon’s answer: aka… we don’t know what the hell we are doing.
I am Zain from Amazon Leadership Team.
We understand that your concern is regarding bullet points character limit as on seller central edit listing you were allowed 700 characters where as in the feed file its only allowed 500 characters, you need to know the reason for same.
We empathize with your concern on this matter and also we apologize for any inconvenience caused due to this.
We cant call you as of now due to out of business hours, hence sending details over email.
Seller central UI and attributes limits have been recently updated, a new UI user interface is updated by business and legal teams of Amazon, they have approved and signed the limits for few attributes which include bullet points, so that sellers can provide maximum details on there products.
However high quality bullets which are visible in good manner, and best display on detail page are still 255 characters. Read this : Server Busy
Writing guidelines for high-quality bullet points:
Use more than 10 characters but less than 255 characters
However you as a seller or brand owner can do provide maximum limit bullet points so that your product have maximum and related information.
For Feeds;
Feeds is a different platform were Amazon system should support large files with large attributes and characters used. This platform is in sync with Amazon software and only pre approve feed templates with characters limits for each attribute is already updated into system.
Thus currently from business team feeds only provide 500 character limit for a single bullet.
This different is evident and its same for all the sellers. As of now, their is no inform or equal bullets from seller central and feeds as it can be update to same character limit in future.
Thus, you as a seller can provide 5 bullets or can add more bullets for a single listing to divide maximum character bullets like 700 limit into 2 different bullets.
Further we cant make feeds approving a 700 character limit bullet points as its not approved by internal business team for feeds platform.
However we have forwarded your feedback for same character limit via feed and seller account > Edit listing for a ASIN and if this launched you will be able to see feeds providing 700 character limit.
This information is final and we cant do any further changes to feeds character limit on bullet points as of now, but for future changes your feed back is appreciated and already forwarded to business team.
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Summary
Style Guide Rule is 255 characters (AI bot check possible)
If you follow the Style Guide Rule of 255 characters, it doesn’t matter if we entice you to break the rule with offering 500 characters on excel templates and 700 characters on the Manage Inventory Edit page.
Personally when it comes to bullets … if we are looking to purchase an item and the bullets are long and lengthy, we probably are going to skip the listing. When the bullets are short and concise, we appreciate and it makes it easier to evaluate whether it fits our needs or not. If it peaks our interest, we then would go to the description to get more information.
Several sellers tend to try to put their description in the bullets because it is at the top. When they have problems with the listing, it is harder to figure out the issue.
Maybe it is a generational expectation and we don’t see it through the eyes of a younger generation.
Email probably came after 10pm or overnight … response was most likely from overseas when they were working during their business hours.
Really?
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Okay, not to offend you or anyone else on this message board… but I knew one person was going to respond with “well you don’t need this many characters for your bullet points anyways” when that wasn’t the point of the thread and wasn’t what I was asking. You don’t know the type of products I sell or the type of customer I am trying to sell to. For these products, I have to max out the bullet points due to how technical the products are. I seem to get these types of responses a lot here.
This is just one of their response templates and they didn’t delete it before sending, I never gave them my phone number or even asked them to call me.
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No offense taken here.
Amazon is full of inconsistencies which drives all of us crazy at one point or another.
We only were trying to offer our thoughts. With that said, there is something new Amazon is doing with the upload templates page which lets you upload your file and Amazon “will convert it”.
Since Amazon templates limit the bullets to 500 characters, we wonder if you set your own template up following the attributes at the top but without the formatting, then you could have the bullets be 700 characters like you want. If you were to try this, we would suggest taking one item and try it first before doing your whole catalog.
If you do try this and it works or doesn’t work, it would be great if would come back and let us all know.
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My situation is a bit different than most sellers. I basically manage Amazon sales for a manufacturing company and I have to take all of the product descriptions off our direct sales website and make it “Amazon compliant” so when you have to do this for thousands of SKUs… it can be time consuming. Especially when you are the only person managing the Amazon account. When we release a new product, I copy and paste each of the “bullet points” and put it into website character counter and reduce it down to at least 700. Most of the time I don’t need to but it is nearly impossible to get it under 250-500 characters. I also already tried using 3 different AI platforms and all of them ruin the bullet points. I’m also more of a “do it once the right time” type of person. I could just be lazy and only put one bullet point in there just to get the ASINs created but then I have to remember to go back and “touch up” all of the ASINs.
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We would definitely try that beta template upload option for one item and see if it works.
The thing that would scare us to death would be if Amazon decides to cut the bullets to a mandatory 500 or even enforce that 255 character limit. It could destroy your entire catalog.
Just out of curiosity, what is in the description? … A+ content?
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That was incredibly difficult to read and makes no actual sense. 255, 500, 700, 700 “between 2 bullets”…it was painful.
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A+ Premium
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