Last Updated on
Amazon finally did it.
They’ve leveled the playing field for 3rd party sellers with the with the Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) tool in Seller Central.
What is Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) in Seller Central?
The Enhanced Brand Content tool in Amazon’s Seller Central allows 3rd party sellers to overcome one of the biggest complaints about selling on Amazon: Listings can’t use HTML.
(You still can’t have HTML, but more on that in a second)
In the past, sellers were limited to a paragraph–one single paragraph for product descriptions. You couldn’t even break the paragraph up with line breaks. Those who did were violating Amazon’s guides.
That’s all recently changed.
The Enhanced Brand Content tool allows you as a seller to add images, paragraphs, headers, bolded text, italic text, and bullets to your product description.
This is huge. Amazon’s listings for products they sold always looked so nice with pictures in the descriptions, and formatted in a way you could actually read and digest the information.
Now that tool is available to 3rd party sellers. You can’t add HTML, but the templates Amazon provides makes it so you don’t need to know HTML. It also helps keep the listing clean.
How do you Enable Enhanced Brand Content?
First, this is for sellers who have their own branded or private label products. You need to register for the Brand Registry (not hard), and as this feature rolls out to all qualifying sellers, you’ll see the Enhanced Brand Content link under the Advertising menu item in Seller Central.
Once active, use the tool (drag and drop your images). add text, and then submit for approval. The approval process can take up to seven days, but often it’s faster than that.
In the initial run, we were finding turnaround times of about 24 hours. Sometimes, submissions would go straight to published status.
This could be because the newly submitted pages were for color variations with little change in the content, but sometimes that wasn’t the case. Either way, fast turnaround has been a major plus.
What Should you Put in your Enhanced Branded Content Pages?
For starters, make sure to keep to the rules. You’re not allowed to put urls, domain names, etc, in your images, but as far as we’ve found, you can put text in the images if it’s relative to the product.
One of the main things you can do skip over the mistake that most sellers make on Amazon.
They only talk about the product.
There’s a small subset of the population that wants to know about the features.
Most everyone else wants to know about the benefits.
How will the product make their life better?
How will the product make their life easier, more worthwhile, etc.
Here’s the difference. Let’s say you’re selling washing machines.
Example Feature Wording: Cycle takes 15 minutes.
Example Benefit Wording: Saves you time with a cycle time of just 15 minutes.
Focus your text on how the product can help your potential customer, then your copy becomes centered on the buyer rather than selfishly centered on the product.
Amazon is also starting to roll out video to EBC pages. The same principles apply with product videos. Show how your product provides benefits to the customer.
Amazon is Listening to sellers and Strikes Hard at eBay.
For the longest time, eBay had advantage over Amazon because you could add HTML formatting, images, and paragraph breaks into your listing description.
Now Amazon has leveled the playing field, and they’re doing it in a way that will prevent some of the crazy listings you may see on eBay with purple backgrounds, green text, and flashing gifs.
Be sure to take advantage of this tool for your brand products!
Note: Enhanced Branded Content is Not Indexed for Amazon Search
When EBC first launched, sellers jumped at the chance to put pictures in their listing descriptions as well as formatted text with line breaks.
However, a few sellers noticed a drop in sales after enabling the content.
The suspicion?
EBC text was not indexed in Amazon search results.
In fact, there were some pretty good tests put forth showing that it didn’t index even though Amazon support said that it did.
Well, now Amazon support has come around and said that Enhanced Branded Content is not indexed for Amazon search.
So why use it at all?
Some sellers show that EBC has helped their sales. In fact, there are many sellers in the number one spot on page one for their keywords that are using EBC.
EBC can help convert browsers into buyers.
However, if you feel like it’s not working for you, you can suppress Enhanced Branded Content with the click of a button and return back to the old description format.
Your Business Should Work for you and Not the Other Way Around.
Even with enhanced branded content, and by talking about benefits with great product photos, it’s still hard to get buyer attention, and that’s why marketing is critical to your business success.
It’s about finding a message-to-market-match, and that’s why we recommend the trainings we do which can help you take your business to the moon (hey it worked for NASA). Isn’t it time to take control and discover new possibilities?
