Amazon Updates You Can’t Afford to Miss in 2025

Welcome to the Bring your product idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to this episode of BRING your product idea to Life.

Thank you so much for being here.

Now you might remember that back in April I released an episode that covered the changes that have been made on Amazon in the earlier part of this year.

So that was between January and March and we talked about the rollout of Amazon island, the new European expansion settings, and the Amazon Global Logistics rollout. And if you haven't yet listened to that episode, of course I will link that in the show notes. You can go back and catch up now.

Today I want to update you on a further three things that have changed or are changing on Amazon at the moment that I think you will find useful to hear about.

So this is going to help you stay compliant and competitive before quarter four and of course make sure you know exactly what's coming up and what you need to do and what some of the opportunities are. So the first thing I want to talk to you about is brand analytics.

So Amazon Brand analytics is a powerful tool for brand registered sellers that provides insights into customer search and purchase behavior.

On Amazon, it aggravates data like top search terms customers are using, which products get clicked the most, which have the most conversion share, and even gives you demographic breakdowns for your customers. So this data helps you understand what customers are looking for and how they shop. So why does it matter? Why am I even telling you about this?

Well firstly, I think it's a really useful tool to make data driven decisions. So for example, you can see which keywords are driving the most traffic and sales to your product listings.

You can see what other products customers are viewing or buying after looking at yours. And you can use all of this information to identify opportunities to improve your listings and improve your advertising campaigns.

So you get really good insights.

Brand analytics you can use to optimize your product detail pages to work on your marketing strategies and advertising campaigns, and ultimately you can use it to increase your sales and your visibility. Now we all know Amazon is a really crowded marketplace at the moment.

The information I got on the Internet, whether this is correct is that There are over 6 million Amazon sellers worldwide. So it's really competitive as we all probably know.

And using this data I just think gives you a bit of a competitive edge, particularly as not many people are aware of brand analytics, not many people know they have it or how to use it. So if you can get on top of this now, I genuinely think it's going to be really useful for you.

So in the UK I think sellers started to receive it a couple of months ago. Some features are still in beta mode in the US and we'll expect to get those in the UK a bit later.

So if you keep an eye out on your seller central announcement, you'll find out when be getting new features including your brand analytics and I'll of course keep you updated as well. But as of today you should have the core Amazon brand analytics reports available to you.

So you would find this in your Amazon main menu under the Brands tab in Seller Central. If you're brand registered, I should say this is a free tool for brand registered sellers, which is amazing.

And you should, as I say so if you're brand registered you should have them. If you don't see it, if you go, if you don't have a brands option in your menu or and it's not under your reports.

I've heard some people tell me that actually they don't have a brands tab, but they can see these reports under their reports tab. If you can't find these anywhere and your account meets the brand registry criteria so you are registered and signed up, then contact seller support.

I always hate saying contact seller support, but that really is the best thing to do.

So the reports you should have, and it seems to vary by the people that I speak to and the clients that I work on, is you should have the top search terms, market basket analysis, repeat purchase and customer loyalty analytics. So all of that should be there and available for you now.

So while you won't have absolutely everything, so you won't have all of the reports that are available because as I said, some of them are still just available in the U.S. i think what you do have is really, really useful.

So for example, you can view a search terms report showing what people are typing in the search bar that led to your finding your products and the top three clicks ASINs for each query so you can find out for a particular search was your product the most clicked for that search term or was it one of your competitors? That's really useful information to know and I think we can actually use Amazon brand analytics right now and get some quick wins.

So the whole point of it is to translate all of this data into action. So one thing you could do on Amazon brand analytics right now is to have a look at the top search terms report for high volume keywords.

So so for example, if you find that thousands of shoppers are searching for a feature that your product has, you can make sure that feature is emphasized in your title or in your bullet points.

When I checked the top search terms this week and by the way, I'm recording during a heat wave here in the uk, everyone's searching for fans, calling blankets. All of the things seem to be around keeping cool.

If you had a product that fits that criteria, so maybe you sell, I don't know, cooling pads for dogs as an example, then that would be something you could go and have a look at what are people searching for as relevant to my products and make sure those are included in your listings and your ads if appropriate. So you can also look at search query performance for your own brand which tells you how people are finding you.

So this will help you with ideas for keywords to add to your listings and your marketing campaigns because it might be the things that people are searched typing to find you isn't what you know isn't what you thought it was. So this is really useful information to know.

You can also look at the market basket analysis because this might help inspire bundle ideas or maybe products you need to be adding to your comparison tables or just it just gives you an idea for you know what what you could do to sort of cross sell.

So for example, let's say you sell shampoo and you can see if the market and basket analysis that customers are frequently going somewhere else to buy their conditioner and you sell a conditioner but for some reason customers aren't buying it. You could either highlight the range on your listing somehow, you could add a comparison table or maybe you could offer a bundle.

That's just a few of the things that you could do to help customers buy more from you. It is definitely worth taking a look at brand analytics and exploring it for yourself.

It's quite a hard thing to explain in an audio concept if you are a member of my membership Amazon Made Easy.

I actually recorded a full video about Amazon brand analytics quite a few months ago because it's something that I spotted in my clients accounts a while ago.

Now I want to say it was about two months ago I spotted that we had it, so I recorded a little video taking them through every single report, what's available and how to use it. So if you're a member, you have that, it's in the membership hub. If you're not a member and you'd like access to that, come and join.

Amazon Made Easy is less than a pound a day.

You get access to me, you get access to other members, you have the hub with, honestly, hundreds of videos and recordings and advice and trainings and templates that you might need. I'll put a link to that in the Show Notes.

And if, and if not, something I would suggest that you do is schedule a reminder to review these reports every month, because go and have a look now is great and hopefully you can get some really quick wins from looking at these. But I think the value in these reports is going to be reviewing them regularly so you can see what's changed, changed and what you need to update.

Because as we said right at the beginning, Amazon is, as we know, a super competitive place to sell. Things change really quickly.

I think it would be really useful for you if you could be reviewing these results on a monthly basis and just seeing, is there anything I need to tweak, anything I can change, anything I can do to, to, you know, to, to improve upon my listings? And honestly, I think it will make a real difference.

And if all of this seems just too overwhelming, if you listen to this and thought, wow, this just seems useful, but it seems like a lot, why not book a power hour with me? We can walk through the reports together and we can work out what we need to do.

You know, we can, we can turn the insights that we see, we can come up with a plan for you. So if that's something you're interested in, as I say, you can book that via a link in the Show Notes.

And then the third change that I wanted to talk to you about is actually one that happened earlier this year, back in January, in fact, but a lot of people are still not aware of it, so I thought it's worth covering off, and that is Amazon's product title requirements.

You may have seen that Amazon have got a lot tricked about product titles, how they're formatted, what words you use, how many times you use those words. So let's summarise what's changed and we'll talk about what you need to do.

So the Amazon product titles now have a hard limit of 200 characters, but for some categories, it's actually 150 and for other categories it's even 80. So depending what category you sell in, the limit is slightly different. And as you know, 80 characters is not a lot. In fact, even 200 isn't loads.

You are now not to use any promotional language.

You can't use emojis, you can't use special characters, you can't use all caps apart from in your brand name, if your brand name happens to be written in all, in all capitals and you can't repeat the same word more than twice. And I think the reason for this is to stop sort of spammy titles where people were saying baby buggy, buggy for babies, baby Pratt.

You know, you've seen these kind of listings where the same word is repeated over and over. And we've spoken about titles in this podcast before and I think they need to be clear, concise, the most important information up front.

All of that still applies, but now it's slightly harder depending what you sell because you cannot repeat words and phrases. So in quarter one of this year there were some what Amazon were calling soft warnings.

So many sellers were seeing fix needed flags that come up next to their listings or they might go into their listings to do something else. So may imagine you went in to update a picture or a bit of text and then you see a warning about your title.

I definitely saw this across a lot of clients accounts earlier this year since May, so that's only a month ago.

Automated suppression sweeps are running weekly and this basically means that any listings that are affected vanish from search until they're corrected. And Amazon are not warning people that they've done this in all instances. So if you ignore this.

Well, the first thing is if your titles look spammy, that's not great anyway, because you know it doesn't.

Customers aren't going to trust you as much if you've got a listing that's, you know, that looks kind of spammy, it's got the same words in there the whole time and that will affect your click through rate, which is I guess is the reason that Amazon's doing this. So I guess they do have our interests at heart.

Also, if your listings are suppressed, and this is really the key one, if your listings are suppressed because the titles aren't compliant, you actually lose rank history. And when your listings are reinstated, I am told that they often come back on page five or below.

I don't know how true this is, this is anecdotal, but I do know that unless you're paying for ads, even if you were coming up on page one organically, if your listing suppressed, and then it gets reinstated a couple of days or however long later you may not be coming up on page one. And I have seen that happen. So it's really important to make sure that your titles are compliant.

Something I would suggest you do this week is just have a look at all of your, all of your active listings. You can, you can export all of your listings in Excel or you can do this manually, depending how many listings you have.

Review the character length to make sure you're under the character limit.

If there are any prohibited phrases in your titles like bestseller, 100% guaranteed sale, best offer, you know, all of these kind of things that Amazon don't like, you can take them out. If you have repetitive words in your listings, then that's something else that you can fix.

If you can do this proactively, I think it would be great and try and do this now. And because it might be that you've got listings that have been suppressed due to title and you're just not aware.

So please take a look and if there's anything that needs fixing, please, please, please do fix it.

And the final thing I'll say is while these tools can spot, you know, issues with your title length and they can spot duplicate words, what they're not great at is writing great copy. So they're not these. It's going to be frustrating for you.

I know I've been working with a client this week where we had to take out, you know, uses of a word where a word was used three times in the title and it absolutely made sense and I stand by that. And getting it down to two was hard, but it's really important to do because there is no alternative.

If you don't make these changes, Amazon will suppress your listings, as harsh as that sounds. So please make the time to check your titles, check your listings, all active, that nothing's been suppressed.

And if they have, fix them as soon as possible. And then the final update I want to tell you about is some AI betas. Very exciting. So Amazon has two betas in the works.

One is called Enhance My Listings and the other is called Project Amelia.

So Enhance My Listing is a generative AI that pulls your existing product listing data and it suggests new titles, bullet points and descriptions and it auto detects anything that it feels are missing. So all the attribute fields that you're filling, if there's something that it feels should be filled out but isn't, it'll flag that to you.

And Project Amelia is a chat style assistant that answers policy questions, analyzes performance and will soon be able to do really simple tasks for you, like pausing ads, for example. So it's basically like seller support without being a real person.

And I mean, it's questionable whether that's better or worse than what we sometimes get from seller support.

But anyway, so at the moment this is only available in the us, but what we do know and what I see time and time again is when something's available in the us, nine times out of ten, six months later it's available in the uk, which is why I'm flagging it to you now. Also, you might be listening in the US and you might have access to this.

If you're listening in the US and you don't have access, it's because at the moment both of these tools are invite only. Amazon are stating global rollout later this year. So obviously I'm recording this in July.

So towards the end of this year we're expecting start global rollout. And in the uk, I think we expect access first to brand registered accounts because that's usually how it works.

Brand registered sellers tend to get these new features before other sellers. So if you are brand registered and you're in the uk, I would expect this towards the end of this year, maybe early next year.

I think it's quite interesting the AI side. So I'm going to talk about that a little bit, if you don't mind. Not so much Project Immediate. I think that's like a chat bot.

We'll, you know, we'll see how that is. But enhance my listing. I think it's actually interesting.

So Amazon are saying that they're seeing a 40 lift in listing quality scores where people are using enhance my listing. And they're also saying that 90% of sellers adopt at least one AI suggestion.

Now, I don't know how good that is or not, because I don't know how many suggestions AI are making that sellers are not adopting. But this is, this is the information that I've got.

Real life feedback that I've heard is that the AI copy that this tool is producing is really good for SEO, but it's also quite bland and generic. So that's a real life feedback. I'm also hearing that AI is struggling with products with a bit of nuance.

So for example, anything that's handmade, anything that's technical, anything. There's a bit of a story behind the brand where emotional connection really matters.

I'm told that AI is not doing a great job with those product listings. If this is something you're interested in, you're thinking, you know what, this sounds great. I haven't got time to write my own product listings.

Love to use AI. I think you would need to have some really high quality product data. So you would want to tell AI some really clear features.

You want to give them the dimensions, the materials, the ingredients, absolutely everything about your product. So it has really accurate material to work from and ideally as much material as possible.

I think you would also need to create some brand voice guidelines so that you can make sure anything that's written fits the tone of, you know, of your existing brand.

And I would also say you would want planning time to review this as a human because I think anything generated by AI should be treated as a draft and then we can, can refine it to make, you know, to get it in our own voice, our own tone and obviously, of course, review for accuracy. Because AI, in my opinion, isn't always 100% accurate and doesn't always quite meet the mark.

My, my view on this, if I'm honest, is that I think these tools can help with writing Amazon product listings.

However, I still think that effective listings that are going to connect with customers and really get you sales still require some human input because automated listings might be great for AI. I'm sure they can create listings that contain all of your keywords, but it's not really creative.

I don't really understand how AI will understand nuance.

I don't understand how it will care about your brand voice, how it will connect with your customer, understand what your customer is looking for from your product. And actually, I don't know, I feel like a purely AI written product description might often read as quite robotic or generic.

And if you think about some social media captions, I've definitely seen social media captions, whether it's on LinkedIn or Instagram, where I thought that's written by AI and do you know what I mean?

I think we're sort of getting to the point now where we can spot that and I think it would be a real shame if we get to the point where we're looking on Amazon and we're saying, well, that product listing was obviously written by AI because it just doesn't connect because they might include the right keywords.

But if you don't emotionally connect with your customers and they can't see the benefits of with shopping from you, I think that's actually going to hurt conversions. Yeah. In fact, another piece of information I found on the Internet.

So how true it is, I don't know, is that brands that had AI manufactured content have seen more of an improvement after a human rewrote it to make it sound more authentic. So I think that's quite interesting.

So I would say that if you are thinking of using AI to write your Amazon product listings, once that's available to you, think of it as like a junior copywriter. It's going to be fast, but it's going to be inexperienced, experienced.

And I still think you need an expert edit to make sure that your unique product benefits shine through, that there were no compliance things that the AI misses. And actually I have a darn View listing service that does just that. Don't, don't worry.

This isn't just about me trying to sell the fact I can write your product listings. You don't have to hire me to write your product listings. You can write your own product listings.

But what I am saying is that I really don't think you should rely on AI to write your product listings. I do think it could be great to use it to perhaps identify keywords to use in your listings or to use in your campaigns.

You might want to get AI to do a first draft of your product listing and then refine it yourself. But please, my plea to you is don't let AI write your Amazon listing.

Put it up and just assume it's all going to be okay because I am certain that you can do a better job than AI can. Absolutely short of that. So let's start wrapping this up. So the free updates to think about are Amazon Brand Analytics.

Amazon product title compliance is getting a lot tighter and we've got some AI tools coming up as well. Isn't that exciting?

I think that there are some small things we can do now based on everything we know that we have and we know are coming up that I think would be a great use of your time over August and the summer period. So you could definitely book in some time in your calendar to review your brand analytics.

I really think that if you do nothing else after looking, listen to this episode. Go and have a look. Go and see what's in there. Go and see what useful, insightful data you can find for your business. Definitely do that.

And then make time to do it again the next month and just keep an eye on it and see what you can find out. I genuinely think brand analytics is going to be really, really useful. Also have a look at your product titles. Make sure they're all compliant.

Just have a quick look particularly if you've got, you know, a large inventory on Amazon. Just make sure that nothing's suppressed. Every and everything is currently up there.

There's nothing that needs updating because it'll be awful to discover that you've got a handful of suppressed listings. It's because your title isn't accurate. So definitely go away and check that. And then why not review your listings?

I did an update an episode an update. I did an episode last week all about how you can review, review and refresh your product listings this summer and you can do it all without AI.

So if you missed that episode, definitely go back and take a listen. If this all sounds a bit much and you want some personalized help, you can always book a Power Hour with me.

I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes and I'm going to be back next week with an episode on planning your quarter four promotions on Amazon, so please tune in for that. Thank you so much for listening. As always, thank you so much for everyone who gets in touch with feedback and suggestions for episodes.

Please do keep that coming. I love to hear from you. If you haven't already. Please subscribe. Subscribe. Please review. Please share with a friend. That's a lot, isn't it?

And have a lovely week and I'll speak to you again very soon.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the Fullback catalog and lots of free resources on my website, vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it, and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.