Optimizing Your Merch by Amazon Product Descriptions

Hey guys!

Welcome back to Merchpursuits.com. Today, I’m going to show you how to optimize your Merch by Amazon Product Descriptions. Specifically what to write, what not to right, and the correct format you should be using. The goal is to get your shirt in front of as many potential buyers as possible, right on Amazon.

If you are new to Merch, you’ll want to read this Getting Started post first. Oh, and I started a Case Study about my first 30 days here!

Let’s get started!

Edit: A newer version of this article has been published here! I recommend reading both.

Mastering Keywords for Merch By Amazon

The best way to make sales is directly on Amazon. Not surprising, right? Your goal is make your listing show up for as many relevant keywords as you can without coming off as “spammy”. If you do it right, you’ll never have to market your shirts outside of Amazon.

Before using any other tools – I always start with a tool called MerchData.io to get live, accurate Merch sales data. (Many other tools show older, historical data, so I like to start my research out on MerchData FIRST)

We’re going to focus on optimizing your title, product descriptions, and product features in this post by adding high quality, relevant keywords into each design. This ensures that no matter how someone searches for a shirt, they can find yours. Even if they search something semi-relevant, we want them to find your shirts.

This does not mean you should add a huge list of keywords. This is considered spam, and is against the Merch by Amazon policy. Plus, it looks just plain unprofessional. Spam may work in the early stages of the program, but Amazon will catch on eventually, and you’ll end up losing everything you worked so hard for.

Play by the rules, and Amazon will reward you with sales. It’s as easy as that.

Getting Started

Take a look at the below example Merch by Amazon t-shirt. You’ll see four fields: Brand Name, Title, Key Product Features, and Product Description.

These are the only fields you can add keywords to, so use them wisely.

editingproductdetails

Brand

Essentially, this is the name of your t-shirt store. You can either create all of your designs under one “umbrella” brand, or create separate brands for each. I usually create different stores for each niche.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both. If you use only 1 brand, you risk a competitor swooping in and copying all of your designs. However, if a customer really likes your design and wants to see more, they’ll click on your brand hyperlink to see more.

That’s why I separate each niche into it’s own brand. If they like my beard designs, they are more likely to view my other designs. They couldn’t care less about my wolf t-shirts, so I would create a separate brand for those. On the plus side, if a competitor likes my design, they can click my brand and only see the designs I have listed under that brand.

Title

If they were looking for your t-shirt, what would you type in?

Use the quote, the niche, your target audience, and then add a few modifier terms to it. Things like “funny, cute, hilarious.” You could also add holidays, relation, state, or event.

If you have any additional room, fill it up with other relevant keywords that a customer may search for. Again, don’t make it spammy. There are ways to use up all the title space without coming across as spammy.

Also, don’t use duplicate words in your title. Having the same word twice doesn’t increase your shirt’s rank on Amazon. You are better off finding another suitable keyword to enter.

Good Example of a Merch Title:

“This Beard Is Taken Funny Fathers Day T-Shirt”

Bad Example:

“Cute Funny Hilarious Sexy Beard Shave Men Dad Boys T-Shirt”

Key Product Features

This is where you need to be a little creative. You will be formulating a short story that answers the Who, the What, and the Where of the buyer.

  • Who is the shirt for? (Campers, Hikers, Aunts, Siblings)
  • What do they like to do? (swimming, biking, running, playing video games)
  • Where would they wear this shirt? (work party, camping trip, family vacation, college)

Your completed story will then be broken into the two bullet points. Use both bullet points. Add as many keyword rich keywords as you can fit in each bullet point without spamming or keywords stuffing.

If you don’t, you are missing out on keyword opportunities. I also like to add several modifier terms to my story. Words like “Cute, Funny, Hilarious, Crazy, Best” etc. If you can’t come up with any words, open up a Thesaurus and find relevant keywords that way.

If you don’t know how to write a good bullet point, you can literally copy my example below and swap out any words to match your niche.

First Bullet Point Example

This is the perfect t-shirt for any outdoorsy survivalist, hiker, camper, fisher, rower, homesteader, or nature lover you know that has a unique sense of humor and classy style. If you’re a real nature nut, this shirt is for you!

Second Bullet Point Example

Featuring deer antlers, a quirky pun, camo text, and an impressive beard, this shirt is perfect to wear to the lodge, wild game dinners, hunters safety courses, the gun range, archery practice, or family holidays parties. Show your wilderness spirit by rocking this crazy, hilarious, awesome apparel.

Now, these examples may be borderline “keyword stuffing”. I more or less wanted to give you an idea of the types of words you could use to formulate your “story”.

Speeding Up The Writing Process

Coming up with a good story may seem like a pain in the neck. But in reality, all you need is to create is 1. You’ll use this “story” as a template for any future designs, and just replace the keywords as necessary. But here are a few ways to simplify the process a little.

If you find yourself creating a lot of t-shirts in the same niche, you may want to keep a Word doc of all your completed Key Product Features bullet points. Whenever you add a new shirt, just press CTRL+F, enter the keyword or niche, and it’ll find one of your completed bullet points you used from a previous shirt.

Some people also like to keep a spreadsheet of keywords. Each column is for a different niche, and you can add relevant keywords under each section. That way, you always have quality terms to pick from without having to search everytime you upload a new shirt in that niche.

Product Description

I don’t add anything here.

Several high-volume members of Chris Green’s Facebook group have run A/B tests on this section, and because it’s optional, it doesn’t appear that Amazon is using anything from this section as a ranking factor. It may not always be this way, though. If anything changes, I’ll update this section.

I haven’t personally done any testing on this section, but I’m not having any issues ranking and getting sales by focusing solely on the bullet points.

I find it just reiterates what I’ve already put in the bullet points anyway. But it’s up to you. I may have to go through all my listings in the future and edit these. But for now, I don’t worry about these.

Where to Find Quality Keywords

Wondering where to find high-quality keywords? Or maybe where you can find quality product descriptions to sort of? I always start with Amazon itself, but here are some others:

no-fox-given

(image shown is from Merch Informer)

  • Amazon.com – Enter any t-shirt into Amazon. Look at the top product descriptions, how they’re wording their titles., what verbage they are using. You can even branch out and look at coffee mugs or beer koozies for more ideas.
    • Search other Amazon Merch shirts – Type Lightweight, Classic fit, Double-needle sleeve and bottom hem into Amazon search. Or click this link. Any results will be shirts directly from other Merch sellers.
  • Google Trends – See what’s trending, and take a few of those keywords.
  • Buzzfeed – Buzzfeed uses a lot of catchy, quirky terms that draw in millions of viewers a month. You are bound to get some inspiration on there.
  • Facebook Ads – Yes, those ads you refuse to click may actually help you craft the perfect product description.
  • Walmart / Retail Stores – Especially during the holidays, you can find some great inspiration by walking down the Halloween or Christmas isles. Take your phone or a notepad with you.
  • TV – As long as you aren’t watching 90’s reruns, you should be able to find relevant words or quotes.
  • Keyword Research tools
  • Niche websites – Look up any niche + website on Google, and read through some of their articles.
  • Newspapers, news outlets, and radio – Lot’s of good ideas up up-to-date/trending topics.

Click here to see the full list of Merch Research tools I use.

Wrapping Up

Follow this Merch by Amazon tutorial for each and every shirt, and you will start to see sales trickle though. If you’re already a Merch by Amazon seller, you should really spend a day or two edit all of your listings to follow this format.

If you have any other tips/tricks/advice you think I should add, or if this guide helped you, I would appreciate a share or comment below.

Thanks everyone, and happy merching!

Be sure and check out my next article, How To Do Merch By Amazon Research for an in-depth research guide, or sign up for any future updates or to follow along with my Merch case study!

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Francisco

7 years ago

Hey, do you really think, that the description is not necessary? I mean the amazon search engine scan all detail pages and it makes sense, to add a small description below.

Danny

7 years ago

The description is important because it shows up for mobile viewers, but it doesn’t appear to be a ranking factor on Amazon.

Shannon

7 years ago

Hi, I’m not sure if its mentioned here (having a hard time finding the link) but I love the idea of Niche Wolf but I’m confused on how it works, lol. Is it really as simple as spitting out a few niche topics? What does the “search” column mean? Just curious if you had any more insight!

Danny

7 years ago

That’s exactly right. Someone has done all the legwork of coming up with niche ideas for you, and you basically get to view a set of number of ideas per day. The “search” refers to how much that term is searched for each month on Google.

Monte

7 years ago

I’m one if the A/B testers you mentioned. I like to use the description because the Google crawlers still pick it up. This can bring outside traffic in. I’m not debating or anything. Seems like both methods have good results. One thing I’ve learned from stock trading is to smartly use leverage. I personally beleive the description increases my leverage. By not doing a description we could save about a minute of time. 1 minute over 8000 shirts equates to 113 hours. So there’s benefits to both sides IMHO.

Danny

7 years ago

That’s correct, adding a description helps it show up in Google search results. As does adding a Brand name like “Funny Fox T-Shirts”

Question: Do you copy/paste the same description across all your designs, with a link back to your main Brand? Or do you make the descriptions very similar to shirts bullet point?

Mike

7 years ago

Danny… you’ve mentioned before to be very careful about trademarked and copyrighted material. Does that extend to product features keywords? Let me give you an example. Say I decide that ‘Hold the Door’ is not copyrighted because it’s a common phrase (it’s risky so I wouldn’t actually try it – but bear with me)… I make a ‘Hold the Door’ Tee and obviously don’t mention Game of Thrones or Holdor etc on the Tee because they WILL be trademarked/copyright terms and Amazon will pan me for it. I also don’t mention Game of Thrones or Holdor in the brand or title. Could I refer to such terms in the product description or product features/ Could I write something like… exemplify the saying you first heard on Game of Thrones…. for example. The reason such a reference might be useful would be because although my product wont have a trademarked/copyrighted term on it – I might be able to rank it in the thematic category where somewhere would be interested in buying the Tee.

Danny

7 years ago

This is a tough one. I try to steer away from copy written material of any kind, so I haven’t tested my luck with such a scenario. However, as long as you aren’t using any copywritten GoT images, ideas, quotes of any kind – you should be okay. The intent is still there though, so I can’t promise a human reviewer wouldn’t flag it for rejection.

Lil Lil

7 years ago

plhow can I get the side banner off the page. I cant read half of it because of it. You have a great site, but this is annoying.

Danny

7 years ago

I apologize for that. I removed it.

Ivan Palii

7 years ago

You are right, Danny. We don’t know which keywords to use exactly in our product listing. But we know some rules of statistics. More number of relevant keywords we will use, more probability to cover the big number of queries.

Darryl hill

7 years ago

I found this article very useful. I’m new to this and have made 17 sells so far with only 17 products. I was wondering about the brand name and now I know. Thank you for your advise. I’ve been in marketing for years and never have I found that have actually gave real helpful advice.

Irina Klimenko

7 years ago

Hi! May you explain about your first bullet point example – about which design it is?

Fred Jumayao

6 years ago

Thanks so much for a thorough explanation of these key fields. I have heard similar descriptions, but you articulated clearly what’s important. Btw, I’m an IT Manager as well, but my kids are way older than yours 🙂

Angelo

6 years ago

Talking about niches… am targeting Spanish speakers, should i write everything in Spanish?

Danny

6 years ago

You definitely can!

lisa nickels

6 years ago

Hi Danny,

thank you so much for this support. I´m a rookie and start yesterday, but with your tutorial it was so easy 🙂
….your bullet point saved my afternoon 🙂
Regards from Cologne, Germany
cheers, Lisa

Memo

6 years ago

Hi,
Thank you so much for this rich article, it really opened up my eyes on how to manage my sales on Merch Amazon, especially being a beginner in the field is not that easy. I needed your illustration about how to format the details as best as possible. Thanks again

Danny

6 years ago

You are very welcome! I’m glad I could simplify things a little for you.

hicham

6 years ago

i found that that the words ‘perfect’, ‘best’, ‘idea’ are trademarked. what do u think? shall we still use them ?

Kevin O'Brien

6 years ago

Thanks, I have been reading you since I began about 6 weeks ago. I can’t recall others posts at the moment but as for this one, I automatically did exactly all you mention here before ever reading this, and it’s great to be reinforced! I really have done precisely all these things and have made but one sale (plus a mercy sale and 5 by me), now up to 7. I am at tier 100.
I am not pursuing this as something passive, I know people can with the right products, information, and work, be quite successful at Merch By Amazon sales. I am not at a position to work outside the home now and am working hard at this, am an artist, writer, and know about business/retail from my background and all it entails.
So, I am doing a lot of original work, trying to do the verbiage only route to a degree, follow what you say here but do add the description. Merch now shows you the keywords they selected for your shirt and a few, for example, I wrote funny 3-4 times in features as well as once in the title and again in the description on one shirt yesterday and tododay it shows up: Keywords; no keywords found :(, sad face and all.
I believe my bullet points are okay. I divide them into adjectives, true features and reasons to and for whom, where and when, pretty much as you describe here. I am, I believe, doing everything well, and have only a handful of improved upon designs and mostly original content that’s worthy of a t-shirt. (By the way, I read that one should include the searchers errors in the copy somehow, such as tshirt t shirt, and do that too).
Do I just wait and see? I guess the long and short of it is I’m doing what I’m supposed to, including FB and Twitter posts (free) and I see a lot of “Iwas an instant success doing bad designs” type things, and I know part of that is made up for hits. Again, I just wait?

Thanks for the time.
Kev

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