How to write excellent product titles for your marketplaces

Ecommerce tips

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Last update March 15, 2023

Overview

Do you need to optimize your product titles for your online marketplaces but don’t know where to start? Read this short and useful guide on how to write excellent product titles that convert into sales on online marketplaces (eBay, Etsy, and Amazon) and how Nembol can help you in the listing process (with examples!). Learn marketer secrets and increase the chance of sales.

Product title optimization: why is this so important?

When selling on marketplaces, titles are vital for multiple reasons:
a) they immediately tell your potential customers what they are looking at;
b) they give the first impression on your professionalism;
c) they are essential to SEO. Without the right title, your items won’t be found by buyers;

Therefore, writing product titles should be a priority in your workflow. But rather than just focusing on writing compelling titles for customers, what you should try to achieve is understand the SEO best practices of each marketplace you sell on, to get prioritized by the platform algorithm.

Here are some useful articles on this matter:

Best title for online selling

As mentioned above, when writing product titles for an online marketplace, you have to bear in mind that you have to optimize them both for customers and search engines. This can be really challenging at the beginning, but practice makes perfect. Every experienced seller can relate to that: you will get better the more you try, so don’t be discouraged if you can’t immediately find the perfect titles for your listings.
Keep practicing, and you will improve.

Here are some quick tips on how to write product titles that sell on marketplaces:

Optimize your titles for search engines: a title should be able to describe the product at the first look, but it should also be able to make the listing findable both on internal search engines and on Google.To do so, use keywords and key-phrases, including specifics, brand names, and model names.

Make your titles readable: titles that can be easily understood convert into sales better. Try to think from the buyers’ perspective and include all words that may be important to make your potential customer immediately understand what you are selling.

Example of a bad title: “Jacket M 42 BLK season 03 – 6677543”
Example of a better title: “Fall-Winter men’s black Jacket, size M”

Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title: in most marketplaces, when your listings appear on the search result, only the first 20-60 characters will appear. This is the reason why you should clearly state what you are selling in the first words of your titles.

Example of a bad title: “hand-made in Italy brown with black metal tips laces size 10 winter leather shoes”
Example of a better title: “Leather shoes hand-made in Italy, brown, size 10, with black laces”

Look professional: avoid spelling mistakes, typos, and special characters, don’t use all capital letters, and write in only one language. The title, along with the picture, will give the first impression of your professionalism.

Example of a bad title: “LEATER SHOES! hand-MADE in ITALIA! // brwn, size TEN, with black laces“
Example of a better title: “Leather shoes hand-made in Italy, brown, size 10, with black laces”.Everyone knows that “the first impression may also be the last impression”, so it is absolutely imperative for you to communicate reliability and seriousness to your customers from the beginning on. This will make you stand out between the other thousands of sellers on marketplaces.

After this preliminary, general considerations on what automations and tools you can rely on to write and optimize product titles?

Product optimization by channels

How to optimize eBay titles

Every marketplace is different and has different rules and criteria. What works for one channel may not work for another one, so we recommend using tools to achieve best results.

A good eBay title must contain up to 80-characters limit for titles. This is a potential problem for users who share the same listings on multiple channels, because not every channel allows the same title length, and eBay has the shortest titles of all.

For this reason, Nembol has developed two useful functions that you can find and activate in your eBay settings on your Nembol account, under List to eBay:

Activate the two functions in your eBay settings on Nembol
Activate the two functions in your eBay settings on Nembol

1 – Title prefix: you can choose a word or sentence that will be automatically added at the beginning of the title of each of your future eBay listings. This is extremely important for search results optimization.
You can use it to insert the brand name of your products, or some other recurrent specification.

Example: if your product title is “Men’s Waterproof Snowboard Jacket” and you set the prefix as “Quiksilver”, your item will be listed on eBay as: ”Quiksilver Men’s Snowboard Jacket”.

Title prefix is super useful for users transfering listings to eBay from their own online store, where the brand is typically not in the titles but in some filter or category.

2 – Shorten titles: Nembol can automatically shorten all the titles of your next eBay listings to the max length accepted by eBay.

Example: if your title is “Men’s Waterproof Snowboard Jacket in Goretex 30k columns with big chest pocket and wrist pocket” you will have 15 characters over the limit. Nembol will cut the title at 80.

Note that Nembol does not truncate words, so you won’t have “Men’s Waterproof Snowboard Jacket in Goretex 30k columns with big chest pocket a…”, but your final title will be: “Men’s Waterproof Snowboard Jacket in Goretex 30k columns with big chest pocket”.

After you write a title for your listing, remember to improve eBay SEO by tweaking product description, data and photos.

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How to title Etsy listings

Etsy allows you to write product titles with up to 140 characters, but we suggest staying between 75-120. By doing so, you’ll be able to fit in enough keywords, but without writing a title that is tough to read.

Multi-channel sellers who use Nembol to list on Etsy have the possibility to active two useful functions that will make the listing process much faster:

Activate the function in your Etsy settings on Nembol
Activate the function in your Etsy settings on Nembol

All lowercase letters: if you import from other channels, your titles may be all-capital letters. Be aware: Etsy does not accept this kind of formatting and will reject your listings. Nembol helps you on this.

In Etsy settings > List to Etsy on your Nembol account, you can find the “Titles in lowercase” option.
If you turn it on, all your titles will be transformed in all-lowercase, except for the first letter. Otherwise, error returns from Etsy will consequently force you to correct your titles one-by-one in Nembol.

Once the “Titles in lowercase” is active, it will apply to all your future listings, and also to your past listings if you edit them in Nembol.

Example: if your title is “SKATEBOARD BOOTS”, Nembol will transform it into “Skateboard boots”, just for Etsy.

Special characters fix: characters like “%”, ”&”, and ”+” are absolutely don’ts on Etsy. Nembol automatically removes them when listing on Etsy, preventing bad selling performances.

Following Etsy optimization tips can help you improve your reach, boost sales, and therefore increase the chance to get the “bestseller” Etsy badge!

Amazon product title best practices

When listing on Amazon, consider that:

  1. Titles must not exceed 200 characters (including spaces);
  2. Titles must not contain promotional phrases (such as “free shipping”, “100% quality guaranteed”);
  3. Titles must not contain special characters for decoration (such as ~ ! * $ ? _ ~ { } # < > | * ; ^ ¬ ¦);
  4. Titles must contain product-identifying information (such as “hockey helmet” or “chair”);

Amazon is always the trickiest channel to list on. Except for the case you are publishing a product that has not been listed on Amazon yet, you will have to stick to the title that is already associated to the barcode.

If you are publishing a product that is new to Amazon, you probably should follow some Amazon best practices to maximize your title efficacy. Some other suggestions are:

  • Spell out measure words such as inch, ounce, and pound (write 6 inches, not 6″)
  • Use numerals instead of spelling out numbers (write 7, not seven)
  • Capitalize the first letter of each word

We hope you enjoyed this article. If you like the subject, we have this 101 guide on how to structure your titles to maximize your selling performances: How to write product titles that sell on marketplaces.

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