Guide

Amazon search terms: what goes in the 250 bytes

Amazon gives you a hidden keyword field called generic keywords, and it is capped at 250 bytes. Not characters. Bytes. Most sellers fill it with the words already in their title, which is the one thing guaranteed to waste it.

Bytes, not characters

An accented letter costs two bytes. An emoji can cost four. So a field that looks like 250 characters of room is less than that the moment you write a word like café, and Amazon truncates rather than warning you. Count bytes if you are working in anything other than plain English.

Never repeat a word from your title

This is the rule that gives you the field back. Amazon indexes the title and the search terms separately, then matches against both. A word in both is a word indexed twice and a handful of bytes spent buying nothing.

If your title says "Hand Thrown Stoneware Mug", then hand, thrown, stoneware and mug are already working. Spend the 250 bytes on what the title had no room for: pottery, ceramic, cup, artisan, wheel thrown, handmade, gift.

It is a bag of words, not a list of phrases

Three things follow from that, and all three save you space.

• No commas. Separate with spaces. Commas are bytes that match nothing.
• No repeats. Writing "mug" once covers every phrase containing mug. Amazon recombines the words itself.
• No singular and plural both. One form is enough, and the second is a word you could have spent on a synonym.

Also skip your own brand name and anything already in a structured attribute. Those are indexed from their own fields.

The five bullets are not five sentences

Bullets are where a shopper actually decides, because they sit above the fold and the description does not. Lead each one with the benefit in two or three words, then the detail that backs it up. A bullet that opens with "This product is" has spent its most valuable position on nothing.

Five is the number to aim for. Fewer looks unfinished, and a sixth is usually not shown.

Flat files are per category

Amazon has no single upload format. You download a template from Seller Central for the category you are listing in, and it arrives with three header rows and a column set specific to that category. A tool cannot hand you a finished Amazon file without knowing which template you have.

What every template does share is a core of field names spelled the same way throughout: item_sku, item_name, product_description, bullet_point1 through bullet_point5, generic_keywords. Rows built against those paste into the template you downloaded.

How this compares to the others

Amazon is the only one of the four with a hidden keyword field, and the only one that counts a limit in bytes. There is a table of all four side by side, and pages on Etsy tags, eBay titles and Shopify product imports.

listWright writes Amazon search terms that skip every word already in the title, de-duplicated and cut to fit the 250 bytes. Checking listings you already have is free.

Amazon changes its templates and its limits by category and over time. This page describes how things stood when it was written, and Seller Central will say so before we do.