A few weeks ago, Amazon hit us with yet ANOTHER change that will affect quite a few product listings: Amazon will no longer support HTML tags in the product description of product detail pages.
Descriptions are an essential part of any Amazon listing. Although they don’t make a significant impact on keyword indexation, they provide the opportunity to truly describe your product’s features and benefits, explain crucial product details, and allow customers decide if your product is the right choice for them.
Before Amazon hit us with this new ban, HTML tags were a lifesaver for so many Amazon sellers! It allowed them to spice up boring descriptions, make them much more structured and readable, and make the key benefits pop by making them bold. So, in other words, it pretty much gave Amazon brands a chance to stand out from their competitors and increase conversions, solely with their well-structured descriptions.
But of course … Amazon had to go in and make this process a lot more difficult by banning HTML tags. Are we even surprised at this point? Not really, lol. According to Amazon, this new ban took place in order to improve security and to better compatibility with non-HTML devices. Do we believe it? Sure. Are we stoked on it? Definitely not.
Before the ban, Amazon sellers were able to use HTML tags like bold, paragraph, and line break tags. But now, sellers can ONLY include line break tags in their descriptions. Any description with HTML still included past July 17, 2021 will either be partially removed or displayed without HTML (so pretty much just a massive chunk of unstructured text).
If you’re feeling frustrated, don’t worry, you’re not alone … the whole Amazon world is feeling your pain. Now that we can’t spice up our descriptions to stand out from our competitors, what do we do? We pivot and focus on creating A+ content instead (previously known as EBC or Enhanced Brand Content). This is a tool available for vendors and sellers who have Brand Registry in order to better showcase their product. This tool allows sellers to customize Amazon product descriptions by adding images, detailed content, brand stories, and more. Adding A+ content to your listing allows you to display your product to potential customers in a visually appealing way. This, in turn, will increase your conversions and sales.
SO, when Amazon gives us lemons, what do we do? We make sweet, sweet lemonade. Don’t dwell on this new (annoying) ban, lets pivot as we entrepreneurs do, and focus on creating that A+ content that will stand out from the rest!
