Maybe worse than the possibility of an AI revolution is the possibility of an illiterate AI revolution. If the T-800 is going to kill us, may it at least have the decency to speak properly? (Sometimes I think how sad it must be for Dogtamer to read what others write and it makes me want to no post at all out of respect to his sanity )
I checked my listings yesterday and I do have a couple of combos that have long names. Not for the fun of making the name long like VTR indicated, but because if you have a combo of 4 different things, and you use on average at least 5 characters for the brand, that only leaves 17.5 characters for each item of the combo. That’s gonna be fun.
Amazon says that the reason for this is “This ensures that your title will fully display on mobile and is consistent with the title length used by other online stores.”
Except when we added the item highlights, the listing just adds a pipe | and extends the title even further then it went without the highlights, making most of the title and the highlights unreadable in all formats.
The item title and highlights combo on desktop is also being cut off where it never was before. And the mobile is worse then ever. see photos.
For this item the title is “Ross-Simons Cultured Pearl and Gemstone Necklace in 14kt Yellow Gold” and the item highlights is “Beautiful Cultured Pearl and Gemstone Necklace in 14kt Yellow Gold”
Not only is amazon creating a mountain of work for sellers with this change, it actually makes the problem it “solves” worse than it was before. Classic.
Oh, but that affects SELLERS, not customers. They seem to be actively trying to make things harder on sellers in every way possible, but still have to do everything they can for the customer (or at least, what they THINK the customer wants; I suspect most customers would really like a decent search function…)
If I type in the exact brand and description of the product I want, I shouldn’t have to wade through 4 pages of other stuff, much of it not even in the same category. One or two ads, fine. But I should be able to find what I want.
I’ll see your bluff and raise you with this monstrosity. Amazon won’t let the brand fix it because the ASIN was originally created way back when by a seller!
My only hope for this is that they will limit AI to pull data from “Enhancements” only and stop letting it pull everything off the page and create slop answers leading to increased returns. Every time I tested their shopper AI out it always gave me wrong results, anything from claiming things are organic that are not to testing our products and it saying the wrong fitments
We went thru this some years back in Handmade, they told us, 100 characters, no matter what. Most of us spent a lot of time editing listings and trying…Then they said ok nah we’re not actually enforcing that.
But worse, recently amazon has been (not me, them) inserting my brand name into the start of my titles. I didn’t bother asking about it because at this point it doesn’t seem worth the effort to fight, and I didn’t really mind. But that’s about 15 characters wasted right there.
Oh and a third thing. My stock in FBA has item names on the labels. I have no doubt some nit wit is going to get their item and be all “but the name isn’t the same I got the wrong thing” and that will be fun…
Sure, get rid of 300 character titles, go for it. But was 100 a bridge too far? And get your AI out of my face…
Thought, are they going to try to be like Google and go entirely AI answers, removing search results? If someone puts in what they are looking for the chatbot gives them what they think meets their criteria. Sponsored results with the highest get bid first dibs at being mentioned.
I really hope not because that is going to skyrocket returns.
We have reviewed our AI recommendations but was reluctant to accept. What we were going to try on one ASIN was to use the AI recommendation to help create the 75 character Title and 125 character Highlight. We had one bullet that had AI recommendation to address also. At the same time, we were going to review all other attributes and do a little adjustment (clean up past bot changes).
Since we will be doing a slow selling ASIN, anything Amazon does won’t hurt us but will teach us how the battle will go with the rest of our items. We will attempt this tomorrow (Saturday) and hopefully can give some feedback either later in the day or Sunday.
Note: We will not be accepting the AI-recommendation but rather inputting the recommendation or something close to it and saving the edit.
I looked at ours and they seem fine. Not going to accept them. Let the system do that so we can all be on the same playing field and out of business on 7-27
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