Welcome back friend!
What Amazon’s Title Change Really Means
As you probably heard, On July 27, titles drop from 200 characters to 75, and anything still over gets rewritten by Amazon's AI (Find it under “Enhance my Listings”) All of my listings are over (a perfect score, finally 😅). I wrote every bloated one of them myself. Not because I liked them: because a good chunk of rank flows through title keywords.
Nobody wanted 200-character titles. Shoppers didn't. Amazon didn't. Sellers didn't. It was an arms race. Amazon's style guides asked for short titles for years. We all kept stuffing because that’s what worked. You could literally add in your targeted keyword phrase and often watch your rank increase.
So why now? Amazon's own sentence says it: titles should be "consistent with the title length used by other online stores." Amazon wants titles to appeal to every shopper, everywhere. And they want our titles to not look keyword-stuffy and ugly. Why? The same reason as always, relentless focus on customer experience. Everything drives it.
But what does it really MEAN?
Well.. Our four big bets:
- Reviews and your main image matter even more. When every title is short and looks the same, the title stops being the thing that separates you. What's left on the search page is your image, your price, your star rating.
- CVR dips, and CTR probably ticks up on Desktop. A fat descriptive title pre-qualified the shopper before they clicked. Take it away and more people click thinking they're on the right product, find out on the page they're not, and leave. More clicks, worse clicks. Mobile probably stays the same.
- Your brand name is a liability. It goes first and it counts against your 75. If people search your brand, those characters matter. If they don't (like most of us), you're burning scarce space on a word that does nothing for you, and you don't get to opt out.
- PPC gets more expensive. Fewer keywords per title means more sellers crowding the same high-value terms. Same words, same page, same ad auction.
The IVS
Big thanks to Chelsea Cohen of SoStocked for this week's IVS. Chelsea co-founded SoStocked with her husband, Ari, graduated high school at 15, and is one of the smartest people in the Amazon space. When she speaks, we listen.
P.S. Want to be featured in the IVS? Have a great tip you want others to know about? Reply to this email!
Do You Know Your Greatest Storage Liabilities?
Hey Selling From the Beach! Check out the below video where I break down how to track and identify all kinds of fees from excess inventory (and how to handle them like a pro).
The magic number you need to watch out for is “270.” After that, FBA aged inventory surcharge fees skyrocket. Check out this video where I break down how to find exactly what you’re paying (or are about to pay). Also, how to leverage Amazon’s sales events to move old inventory, and the true cost of liquidations.
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The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
The 5 Second Bundle Calculator That Generates New SKUs to Sell
Some things just go together. Like Coke and lime at a beach bar. And somewhere in your catalog, two products your customers already buy together, one cart at a time, waiting for you to notice.
We built a free tool that notices for you.
Download your All Orders report from Seller Central (two clicks, instructions on the page), drop it in, and it reads the carts: which products keep landing in the same order, and which single products people already buy two and three at a time. That second list is a multipack begging to exist.
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The Week We Pulled the Plug
This week we took the boys off their devices. There were a few reasons behind it, but the honest one is simple: too much time on them. Day one was rough. Lots of wandering around, but by day two they figured it out, the way kids always do. They were a little crazier with each other, sure. More wrestling, more noise. But they were building Lego, swimming, out on bike rides, and reading a ton (we still allowed the Kindles, since I'm not going to punish a kid for reading). The big surprise was One Piece cards. They'd dabbled before, but this week they went deep into deck building, trading, strategy, grading, the whole thing. And through all of it, Chase still managed to stay in his Christmas PJs almost every single day. It's July. The kid is committed.
Then we forced them out to golf with us after a long layoff. Neither kid even had a polo shirt that fit anymore, so the first stop was the golf shop. We only played 9 holes. Chase played every one of them, and Jax took a couple off, which is fine. What got me was watching them swing my clubs. They've both grown a fair amount since the last time out, and suddenly they're generating real power. Smashing it.
That's the part I keep thinking about. Sometimes kids try something and don't like it, and we chalk it up as "not their thing." But maybe the timing was just wrong. Wrong age, wrong ability, wrong attention span. Golf didn't stick the first time around. This week it looked completely different. Sometimes you need to try it again.
I know we're not the only parents wrestling with this. Screen time is the fight of our generation of parents, and there's no perfect answer. But watching the boys this week reminded me that boredom isn't a problem to solve. It's usually the thing that comes right before they figure out how to be kids again, instead of device zombies.
Does Your Amazon Brand Have a Website?
My friend reminded me this week that my branded website could cost me six figures. Not from bad design or poor conversion. From a lawsuit.
Over 25,000 ADA accessibility lawsuits have happened since 2018. Four firms filed nearly 3,000 of them last year. Settlements run $5K to $50K, sometimes higher. Legal fees stack on top. The ADA requires your website to work for people with disabilities: blind users with screen readers, deaf users, people who can't use a mouse. If it doesn't, you're in violation.
The fix is almost stupid in its simplicity: a plugin. There are thousands of them on Wordpress/Shopify.
Not legal advice obviously, but look into this. It’s extremely common. Stay Safe!
Parking at the Airport?
Book your spot before you leave. Paying at the gate costs 30 to 50% more than if you'd reserved ahead.
When you fly somewhere, parking often gets shoved to the last minute. Your flight leaves in 48 hours, you haven't thought about where to leave the car, so you drive straight to the airport garage, roll up to the gate, and pay whatever the rate is. That's the most expensive way to park.
Use SpotHero or ParkWhiz instead. Both let you search, compare prices from dozens of lots near the airport, and book a spot in a couple of minutes. Both work with the major airports (and hundreds of smaller ones), so odds are good your destination is there.
Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.
Angela Duckworth
BEER! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Enzo asks about the difference between SellerSprite and Helium 10
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To your success,
Rob & Max