Guide
Listing limits on Etsy, Shopify, eBay and Amazon
The four marketplaces agree on almost nothing. A title that fills Etsy's allowance is two and a half times what eBay accepts. Etsy gives you thirteen tags, Shopify gives you two hundred and fifty, Amazon gives you a byte count, and eBay gives you none at all. Here they are together.
| What | Etsy | Shopify | eBay | Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title | 140 | 255 | 80 | 200 |
| Keyword field | 13 tags | 250 tags | none | 250 bytes |
| Length of each | 20 | 255 | 65 (item specific) | whole field |
| Meta title and description | no | yes | no | no |
| Bulk upload of its own | no | yes | File Exchange | per category |
| Image alt text you write this | per listing, by hand | in the import | no | no |
Why one title cannot serve all four
Look at the first row. If you write to Etsy's 140 and paste it into eBay, eBay takes the first 80 characters and throws the rest away, mid word. Write to eBay's 80 and put it on Etsy and you have left 60 characters of the most valuable field on the page empty.
There is no length that works everywhere. A title has to be written for the place it is going, which is why converting one into another is the wrong move and writing each is the right one.
Where your keywords go
This is the row that surprises people most, because the four are not variations on a theme. They are four different mechanisms.
- Etsy. Thirteen tags, twenty characters each, no commas inside one. They are phrases, not words, and most shops use about eight of the thirteen. More on fitting a phrase into 20.
- Shopify. Tags exist but they are filters, not ranking. Your search traffic comes from Google, so the meta title, the meta description and the url are the fields that matter. More on the Shopify import.
- eBay. No tag field at all. Keywords live in the title and the item specifics or they do not exist. More on eBay titles.
- Amazon. A hidden field capped in bytes, indexed separately from the title, so repeating the title in it wastes it. More on Amazon search terms.
Which ones will actually take a file
Bulk listing is not one problem with four answers. It is four problems.
| Marketplace | What a CSV can do |
|---|---|
| Shopify | a real importer, Settings then Import, and the file uploads as it is |
| Etsy | no CSV import for creating listings, so it goes through the API or a third party importer |
| eBay | File Exchange, but you supply the category, the condition and the site parameters |
| Amazon | a flat file template downloaded per category, with three header rows |
If you came here believing you could export once and upload everywhere, that is the row to read twice. There is a longer answer on why Etsy has no CSV import and what people do instead.
What this means if you sell in more than one place
Keep one record per product, in your own spreadsheet, with the facts: what it is, what it is made of, the colour, the size, the price. That file is yours and it does not belong to any marketplace.
Then write each channel from it, to that channel's limits. Not once and reshaped. The facts are shared. The copy is not.
All four change their limits from time to time, and several vary by category within a single marketplace. These are the marketplace-wide ceilings as they stood when this page was written. Each one's own seller documentation will say so before we do.