The Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard on Seller Central highlights essential product information for customers. It’s part of Amazon’s promise to make the buying and selling experience the best one for customers and retail sellers alike.
If you are a retail seller, the Listing Quality Dashboard can improve your brand discoverability, reduce customer returns, and enable product overview experience.
Do you want to know how to improve your listings with the new Amazon Listing Quality dashboard? Read this article to find out!
The Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard
The Listing Quality Dashboard is a newly launched tool on Amazon’s Seller board that highlights important information for customers. The tool helps you improve your products’ discoverability, enables a new experience on the product detail page, and visibly reduced customer returns.
The Elements of a Good Listing
You can use the Listing Quality Dashboard effectively if you have proper knowledge of what it takes to create a good listing, how to enhance your listing, and the practices of listing quality improvement.
Recommended: How to Write Winning Amazon Product Listings in 2020
Listings that help improve the customer experience require:
Basic Product Information
Images
Use clear images of your products — they help customers make a quick buying decision.
Brand Designation
Always include your brand designation. If customers search for products by brand and your listing is missing the brand designation, they might never find your listing.
Descriptions
Provide details of each product so that customers can compare similar products to make a smart buying decision.
Detailed Product Information
Input detailed information on each product, such as:
- the size of the product — this helps customers to find the right product quickly and buy the product that fits their needs.
- the type of material used — this helps customers narrow down their search by their needs or preferences.
The Benefits of the Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard
The dashboard recommends the improvements needed in your product listings. By adding the recommended missing elements, you can:
- Improve product discovery:
Customers usually filter search results for a product by using specific attributes. You should add those attributes so that customers don’t miss your products when clicking those attributes.
- Enable the Product Overview experience (beta):
Product Overview is a new experience added to highlight vital product attributes above the product detail page’s bullet points. It helps customers to evaluate your product efficiently and make a quick buying decision. (Currently, the feature is available for only a few items, but Amazon is working to enable this feature for more products.)
- Potentially reduce customer returns:
Customers often return a product due to the lack of crucial information about that product on the detail page. e.g., compatibility features of headphones and cables. By adding more specific information, you can prevent frequent customer returns.
- Take time-sensitive actions:
The tool highlights the listing information that needs to be filled within a certain period to prevent possible listing suppression.
Use the New Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard
The Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard is a listing enhancement tool that suggests enhancement opportunities. It gives you with the vital information that you need to add to your listings. (Note that the Listing Enhancement feature will be visible if any enhancement opportunity is identified; otherwise, the link won’t appear.)
Here’s how to get started:
Step #1
Go to Inventory and select Manage Inventory, then Listing Quality Dashboard.
Step #2
Select Listing Enhancement from the horizontal menu.
Step #3
View all the enhancements from the Listing Enhancement page, or click Enhancement Type for a specific type of listing enhancement opportunity.
Step #4
Enhance your listing in one of three ways:
- Input missing information in the Enhancement column using the drop-down, then Save;
- by selecting multiple products that need the same enhancement. Click Enhance ‘n’ listing (‘n’ is for the number of the products) and submit a value in the pop-up field to enhance multiple listings;
- or, by clicking Edit and navigating to the Edit Product Info page where the products’ missing details will be highlighted.
The changes will appear after 1.5 hours. You can click the View all X missing attributes link to view the crucial attributes missing for a particular product.
Usually, these missing attributes will be grouped under their relative field such as “Improve Search Filters” or “Reduce Customer Returns”.
But the All tab groups the entire list of attributes under one view. You can fill in and save the attributes you need from that pop-up window.
Enhance Listings through the Listing Quality and Suppressed Listings Report
- Go to Inventory Reports from the Inventory menu.
- Select Listing Quality and Suppressed Listings Reports from Select Report Type.
- Choose Excel (new) format for the report.
- Click Request Report to download a report, which can take 45minutes to run.
- Once the Listing Enhancement report is complete, click Download.
- Open the report and update ‘Corrected Values’ from the Enhancement Opportunities tab and check ‘Valid Values’ in the Data Definition tab.
- Save the report with the changes you made.
- Go to Inventory and select Add Products via Upload.
- Click the Check and Upload your Inventory File tab and scroll down to upload the file.
- Select File type — Listing Quality and Suppressed Listing Reports.
- Click Choose File and browse to your saved Listing Quality and Suppressed Listing Reports.
- Now click Upload. It might take up to 24hours to update the report.
Use Listing Classification Alerts
Amazon alerts sellers to improve their listings when they are not correctly classified on the Amazon marketplace. The listings might be missing a category (item-type) or under a category that is too broad. For instance, while listing a digital SLR camera, input item-type as “Digital-SLR-Camera” and not “digital-camera,” which is too broad, making it difficult for customers to find what they want in search results.
Use the Product Classifier to identify the right classifications for your products. Update the item-type cell in your Inventory file or XML with the value you get from the Product Classifier.
Fix your listings
You can use the following features to fix listings that aren’t classified correctly:
- Manage Inventory from Seller Central (discussed above)
- Downloadable reports from Seller Central (discussed above)
- Amazon Marketplace Web Services (MWS) API — this enables you to retrieve Amazon Selling Coach Recommendations. Read the instructions carefully to get access to the Recommendations API.
Acknowledge Amazon Product Authenticity and Quality
Customers trust Amazon as a reliable global marketplace where they can buy with confidence. Hence, as a seller, maintain that faith by acknowledging Amazon’s product authenticity and quality guidelines.
Review the guidelines carefully, which can help you keep your seller account in good condition. Check out Best Practices for Listing Quality Improvements, Product Listing Guidelines, and Condition Guidelines for more information.
Types of Violations
Amazon enforces penalties for sellers who violate their selling policies. Violations of product authenticity are categorized as intellectual property violations. On the other hand, overall product quality violations, such as products that don’t match their descriptions, are classified as product condition violations.
- Intellectual property violations
Amazon acknowledges the intellectual property rights of others. It is your responsibility as a seller to ensure that the products you sell on Amazon are authorized for sale or resale. They must not violate intellectual property rights like copyrights, patents, trademarks, and rights of publicity. And, they must comply with all the applicable laws and regulations under Amazon. For further information, see Intellectual Property Policy for Sellers.
- Product condition violations
You must not ship a product listed as ‘New’ when it has already been opened, used, or has minor damage or imperfections. Products listed as ‘New’ must reach the customer brand new, intact, with no signs of damage or wear. To get more information on assigning the correct condition to your product, view Amazon’s Condition Guidelines.
Shipping a product that doesn’t match the detail page’s description is subject to penalties. Mismatching descriptions include differences in color, pattern, texture, size, and quantity, or shipping an entirely different product. The product’s country language, country version, model, and edition must also match the detail page’s description.
Shipping a defective, misclassified, misrepresented product, or a product that is missing any parts is also a violation. If the products don’t function as stated on the product detail page or lack proper instructions on how the product should function, the seller will be in violation of the product condition policy.
Shipping a product that is already expired or soon to expire when received by the customer is a violation. Products should be labeled with an expiration date, and customers must receive the product with adequate time to fully use the product before the expiration date.
Learn more about Selling Policies and the Seller Code of Conduct here.
Enforcement of Policies
Amazon may take one or more of the following actions in case of policy violations:
- Remove your listing
- Limit/suspend/even block your ability to list and sell
- Remove or dispose of your FBA inventory
- Withhold your payments
- Impose listing restrictions for certain brands, ASINs and categories. (Note: You need approval to list under brands, ASINs, or categories if listing restrictions are applied.)
Best Practices for Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard Improvements
The presence of quality information leads customers to buy a product since the detail page contains the vital information customers need to decide. The following are the key improvements you need to make:
- Product titles that are constructed according to style guide perform better in search results. They help customers to make a preliminary buying decision.
- Images that show multiple angles of only the products for sale and represent the products accurately. Images must have a white background and fill up 85% of the image space.
- Descriptions and bullet points must contain detailed information about the features and usage of the product and highlight specific product information not mentioned elsewhere on the page.
And here are the key best practices to follow:
- Check your recommendations at least once a week — Amazon’s system identifies important missing attributes of a product on a real-time basis.
- Use Pageviews and Sales to prioritize your recommendations. (Note: Amazon will soon launch functionality that will allow you to sort recommendations using these columns.)
- Sometimes Amazon recommends attributes that aren’t relevant to your product. In that case, use the Not relevant for this product option and state why so that Amazon can improve their recommendations. You can also give your valuable feedback at any time to help Amazon enhance the Listing Quality Dashboard experience. Use the Feedback widget at the bottom of the dashboard or email them at [email protected].
Final Thoughts
With the Amazon Listing Quality Dashboard, you will be able to improve your listings on the marketplace. By following these practices, you will enhance your customers’ shopping experience, boost sales, improve your scores and thus increasing product visibility.
