amazon enhanced brand content

Amazon Enhanced Brand Content: A New Way To Improve Your Product Listing

I don’t know if you noticed it yet, but Amazon have quietly introduced a brand new feature for sellers. It’s called “Enhanced Brand Content”. Enhancing your brand content – your product listing – sounds like a long awaited feature to me.

This is really exciting news for Amazon private label sellers. I’m going to explain to you what it is and why you should pay attention to it. On top of that, I decided to use our Collaborative Launch product, Jungle Stix, as a case study. So I am going to include a run-down of how we added Enhanced Content to the Jungle Stix listing. Then we will take a look at some of the results so far.

If you do anything, there is a concise run-down of the benefits and pitfalls towards the end of this post. Make sure you know those details if you’re a private label seller!

What is Enhanced Brand Content?

Well it does do what it says on the tin. It’s an enhanced way to present your product information on your listing page. This will be welcome news to your ears (or eyes), if like me you would prefer to add a little bit of visual flair and enticing narrative to your product information.

You may have previously heard of Amazon A+ Content, which is something that you used to have to sign up for, (and pay a fee), in order to get access to rich-content product descriptions.

Usually this would allow high-profile sellers to add HTML based, premium content, from the Manufacturer, for example:

example of a+ content from manufacturer fitbit
Although Amazon is the biggest ecommerce platform that allows people like us to create a business and make loads of money, it can also be frustrating at times. Confession: I’m a control freak and I like to keep things neat and tidy. So when I first entered a description into Amazon Seller Central and saw my first glimpse of a preview, can you imagine how upset I was when I saw the text had all been squashed into one paragraph. Without any line breaks!


Enter Enhanced Brand Content (shall we call it EBC yet?!)

It’s not quite as flexible as having full custom-HTML control, as we will explore. But it does give you several easy-to-use templates, from which you can build a rich online shopping experience for your customers.
This allows you to:

  • Make your content more scannable – because we know people skim the internet
  • Add images within the description for more visual effect
  • Add subheadings, paragraphs, bold, italics, underlined text and bullet points
  • Section your content into logical chunks of information

 

Using Enhanced Content – 5 Simple Steps

Amazon has now opened this awesome feature up to third party sellers at no extra cost. Apparently, this is for a limited time, so it’s probably something they are testing. It’s actually happened quite low-key, but I believe it is available to all sellers who have private label products (that are under the Amazon Brand Registry).

I’m now going to walk you through the entire process, using Jungle Stix as an example. We will report on the sales metrics afterward.

 

Step 1 – Navigate to ‘Enhanced Brand Content’

Here’s where you can find it within Seller Central:

amazon enhanced brand content in seller central

 

Step 2 – Select a template

Easy enough. What’s next? You just enter the SKU you are looking to create Enhanced Content for and then you will be offered a choice of templates:

enhanced brand content templates

For Jungle Stix, I knew that I had a few sweet images and infographics to work with, so I selected Template 1. Don’t worry, if you choose the wrong one you can go back and change it at any point.

Just for reference, I want to show you what the Jungle Stix listing looked like pre-Enhanced Content:

jungle stix listing before enhanced content

Jungle Stix original product description

 

As you can see, we have got some formatting in the description. But even so, it’s a pretty heavy portion of copy, which has a super wide line-width. (FYI, shorter line width is much better for readability, someone should let Jeff Bezos know this).

 

Step 3 – Add your content

I decided to attack this with our product listing in front of me, and with the folder of product images open ready to go. Take a few minutes to get yourself prepped for this.

We have spent quite a bit of time writing, optimizing and including keywords in our content and for the most part, I just want to break it up, and make it more visually appealing.

So here is where I edited the content based on the template I chose:

edit content fields enhanced brand content

 

It’s really straightforward, and as I move down the page there are more sections where I can add images and text.

Once I was happy with my content, I hit the preview button and I immediately get some messages:

enhanced brand content errors

 

First of all, there are some words in there that are not allowed and it won’t let me submit my content with them included. Interestingly, these were unedited paragraphs from the original listing. Nonetheless, I reworded the copy to be in-line with the rules.

enhanced brand content report
As you can see above, you also get a useful notification if you have more space to add more content. Great!

At the moment I am happy with what I have got, but I may come back at a later date with some new lifestyle photography to spice things up.

Note: At this point I am using my existing product images which are all featured on the listing. In the future it would be worth exploring whether adding more / different types of images here would improve the performance of the product.

 

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Step 4 – Submit for review

Once I was entirely happy and there were no errors I preview one last time:

enhanced brand content final preview
Then I hit submit and it goes off to the powers that be to approve it.

It took Amazon about a day to review the content I submitted. Guess what, it did not get approved the first time around. Here’s a screenshot of the report I received from the disapproved content:

enhanced brand content rejection

 

So although I managed to get around the errors report previously by removing certain words about guarantees or satisfaction, it turns out that I needed to remove all reference of this.

Getting EBC content approved

It’s likely that this content is being approved by humans at Amazon, therefore any mentions of returns information that previously got through the submission errors will be picked up.

This is a good lesson to learn. It is slightly disconcerting that I have to remove this part of the copy from my enhanced brand content, as it was in the original copy and I know that the product has been performing well with it included. Nonetheless, I remove this and replace it with some other value re-enforcements, for example:

“Buy Now and be delighted with these deluxe marshmallow roasting sticks. These bamboo roasting sticks will bring life to your next occasion and many occasions to come.”

The second issue was to remove any reference to actual or relative price or promotion. When I scanned my content back, the only culprit I could find was along the lines of “get more for your money”, or “GREAT VALUE”, with a mention of the pack size of 110 pieces. This could have been picked up due to reference to ‘relative’ price. So I tried playing around with the value offering sentence:

“PRACTICAL & FUN – Get the most out of your purchase with Jungle Stix: 110 sticks per unit will last you through several seasons and many fun occasions.”

Don’t forget that any offending words or references need to be removed from the copy and any graphics or images.

Resubmitting for approval

Once happy with my edits I resubmitted for approval. Here’s the help page from Amazon with all of the requirements and rules for Enhanced Content.

After this I actually got more feedback, that was previously not included. This time it was that one of the images was not of a high enough quality for the size it was used in this content. I simply fixed this by sourcing and uploading the most high-res version possible. Particularly for any infographics or images with words on, it can look really bad if the quality is not high enough.

Tip: Ensure you have high quality photography and infographics if you plan to use Enhanced Brand Content. Even if it gets past Amazon’s checks, blurry images will look unprofessional.


Result: The Jungle Stix Enhanced Brand Content is live (as of 11th January 2017).

Once approved, Amazon will just automatically update your listing and your shiny new content will be there for all to see.

Jungle Stix EBC

There is some white space between the top two sections, which I thought was an issue with Amazon. Upon closer inspection, it might just be that the dimensions of one of the top two images is taller. Something that I can fix myself!

Best Practice

If you are just starting out with Enhanced Brand Content, and your copy is already optimized, then you might want to follow my footsteps and just apply the same copy and images to an enhanced template. This way, you can learn from any roadblocks.

But it is also a good idea to read through the rules. Judging by the scrupulous checks and the varied time it took to get a response, there are real human beings at Amazon checking this content.

For this listing, I used the same images from the main image block, which according to the rules is not allowed. But I was able to get this through still. (Oh and yes, more exciting photography is now on the to-do list).

 

Step 5 – Watch the results

We definitely want to know how Enhanced Brand Content has impacted our bottom line. I managed to get the Jungle Stix content live on the 11th of January. So how did it hold up after a couple of weeks of sales?

I like to do a side-by-side comparison with two date ranges. It’s early days at the moment so I can’t draw a statistical conclusion, but I will share some data for the first few weeks so you can see the thought process behind it.

 

Sales velocity

In the two week period prior to getting the content approved there were 161 total sales:

jungle stix sales two weeks prior to enhanced brand content

And in the two week period since approving the content there have been 176 total sales:

Jungle Stix sales two weeks after enhanced content was implemented

(This data view is from Fetcher – profit analytics software).

This shows that there has been a small increase in total sales, and you can also see some greater fluctuations day by day.

Check conversion rates

What we need to be interested in, though, is conversion rates. If we go to Reports > Business Reports > Sales and Traffic in Seller Central, we can find our conversion rate %:

amazon seller central business reports to find conversion rate
In here you can select date ranges and see your conversion rates (taking into account number of sessions/views and sales). This will be listed as ‘Order Item Session Percentage’:

conversion rates in seller central

 

At the moment, Seller Central can not show the full two weeks (there is always a delay of a few days). But, I can see that conversion rate has barely moved from 5.07% the week before the enhanced content went live, to 4.92% the first week it was live.

As I mentioned, this is just a couple of weeks so it’s really too soon to tell. Obviously we will want to monitor this over the coming months to ensure it’s having a good impact. So far, sales haven’t tanked, but they haven’t increased dramatically overnight, either.

If your product has been selling for a long time, you can even do a year on year comparison, which works especially well if you know you have seasonality. In the name of transparency we will keep you updated on this when we have more data.

 

The benefits of Enhanced Brand Content

There are some obvious benefits to being able to add more to your product listings:

  1. It appeals to different types of shoppers. Whether you scan things, read every detail or stare at images for ages, this type of content is richer, more accessible and more likely to convert a wider range of viewers. It will probably make a better first impression from the off, and prevent some people from bouncing right off your listing.
  2. Opportunity to increases sales! The important one. Improving your listing can equal more sales and more profits. Time will tell how well Enhanced Content works. But it’s safe to say that the original enhanced content A+ sellers could utilize was available for a reason.

Changing your product listing from a regular listing to an enhanced listing might be a way to improve your conversions and profits. Now you can try it for yourself right within Seller Central.

 

What are the pitfalls?

  • There has been some eagle-eyed suggestions that your copy in EBC will not be indexed. Therefore adding your target keywords or long-tail keywords will be ineffective when consumers are searching. (Read more here – scroll to item #3).
  • All EBC content is being approved by human beings, so you can get away with less. A lot of the content that we had disapproved was in our previous listing.
  • This means that you may need to remove copy that you previously knew was working well for you.
  • Takes a while to get approved – in my experience so far it can be anything from a day to well over a week.
  • You really must have high-quality images and graphics as well as engaging content. If you don’t have these, then it’s time to get to work.

Conclusion

So that’s all on this topic for now. It will be interesting to see what Amazon does next to give sellers more creative freedom with our product listings. As an opportunity to provide a richer shopping experience and increase your profits, this is one thing I would recommend you keep on your radar for 2017.

However, as it’s new and because we are not yet sure of the impact it is having on sales, approach with some caution. Try this out with some of your products and test what works. Keep a close eye on your sales over a period of time, and make sure you keep a backup of your original description copy.

We will let you know how it has performed with Jungle Stix when the data becomes available!
Have you already started using Enhanced Content? How have you found it? Has it improved your sales velocity? Let us know in the comments!

48 comments on “Amazon Enhanced Brand Content: A New Way To Improve Your Product Listing

  1. Please have you added anything further on EBC? I have a client I have been “selling” the idea to but want to know it will support additional sales rather than just ‘looking’ nice.

    1. Hey Paul! Thanks for reaching out as we recently updated our Amazon Brand Registry post (which also covers EBC/A+ content); it may be useful is showing your client that EBC can improve conversion rates. Hope it helps!

  2. I recently received a trademark for my product and brand registry. I had thought of doing EBC however, another approach is to have an explainer video in the images. Due to some recent listing optimizations, my conversion rate went from about 8%, something which Viral launch promised to increase and failed to do, to now 15% and that is with a 30% increase in price which makes it at least reasonably profitable.

    However, Amazon somehow finds a way to take 45% of my sales in fees of various kinds. So I wonder if doing EBC is worth the effort and risk. 15% conversion is pretty good, what is the average for most products, I wonder.

    My problem with my current listing is the fact that Amazon puts so much distraction to other products as ‘other viewed products’ etc.

    Given the issues people face, and the fact that the listing actually get more scrutiny when put through EBC makes me wonder if it is worth the time and risk.

    1. Oh wow!

      That’s great feedback on the video stuff. I didn’t realize it was doing that much.

      What are they taking for your fees? Is that just storage fees, referral, and FBA? Or is that just referral?

      And yeah, at the end of the day, Amazon’s always going to promote other stuff. The best way to get aroudn that optimize all of the content above the fold so that you make a sale the moment someone hits the page and doesn’t have to scroll down. In my opinion, EBC and descriptions are meant to convert just in case you can’t do it with the above-the-fold content.

  3. Excellent post. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed!
    Extremely helpful info specially the closing section πŸ™‚ I
    maintain such information a lot. I was seeking this particular information for a very long time.

    Thanks and good luck.

  4. Hello, I’m just getting into EBC, and I noticed you changed back your listing to the regular. What is the reason? Does EBC not work well enough?

    1. Hey Chris,

      Great spot – we did go back to the original listing but it wasn’t intentional.

      Our Jungle Stix was in the old EBC program and grandfathered in to the new one. Recently, Amazon announced that they would no longer be allowing this and all products from the old EBC program needed to reapply to the Brand Registry with a registered trademark.

      So our listing is temporarily back to the original and we’re currently submitting EBC content for all of the MDCS products since we have registered them into the Brand Registry now.

      We did find that EBC had a positive impact on overall sales.

      Hope this helps!
      Kym

  5. Hi guys, I am just checking Jungle Stix in Amazon and I can see that it does not appear with EBC. Have you decided to remove the EBC due to indexing issues? An update on this post would be great!

    Thanks!
    Manuela

  6. Is there any way to upload bulk enhanced brand content in Amazon Seller Central account via any file? What if there are thousands of products – Each product will be entered manually?

    1. Hi Niraj,

      The enhanced brand content is reserved for those who manage their own brands. So if you’ve got thousands of private label products, well… way to go! Haha! But if you’re doing online arbitrage, wholesale, or something where you’re selling someone else’s brand, then you won’t be able to register those brands.

  7. Hey Kim,
    did you guys remove your EBC content from your listing?
    I don’t see pictures anymore in the description part. It seems it’s just text content now. Is there a reason why?

    Cheers
    Mo

    1. Hey Mo,

      Kym’s on holiday at the moment, but I can probably help with this one. I know she’s been going back through the older content and updating it following some of the changes that Amazon’s been making in the brand registry system, so removing the images might be one of those things she’s done.

      1. Hey Dave,
        thanks for your reply.

        But… has she removed them because now they’re not supported anymore or something? Or is she just about to upload new pictures?
        I’m asking this cause i was just planning for a new shooting (ebc purpose) since i just got my brand registered finally. And now I’m wondering what the new brand registry guidelines are… no pictures anymore?

        Cheers
        Mo

        1. Hey Mo,

          Good questions. Kym just got back, so I’ll ask her what’s up. Plus, we’ll be doing product photography again during the Genius Series.

          The new guidelines are that you need to have a TM to get registered, but if you just got through, sounds like you’re fine.

  8. Hey, Kim thanks for the reply. The funny thing about this ‘hellish’ experience of ours is that before we decided to go through the EBC submission we did our research on competitive products and their EBC submissions.

    The approved content we have seen is quite questionable as are the people who check and approve these submissions. They had a problem with us stating our Brand’s lifestyle associations (as I mentioned above) but they didn’t have a problem with the following:

    1. Serious misspellings to the point of laughter like ‘VISABLE Results’ instead of visible, ‘AGAINTS’ instead against etc
    2. They are ok with EBC on creams that show obscene pictures of women’s genital areas (seriously-unfortunately I cant put a link here) but they are against a certified logo showing a bunny that claims that the product is cruelty-free.
    3. They are ok when men and women’s genitals are mentioned by name on the EBC but are against a statement about our care for the environment.

    It just doesn’t make sense. As for your comment above about private sellers, Amazon should be able to accommodate the needs of both, small private sellers (who I respect tremendously) and firms with a larger footprint and credentials that would add to Amazon’s image (unless they just want to mostly host small businesses and fidget spinner sellers!).

    It all boils down to the dynamics of the market at the very end. Amazon needs to decide if they want buyers like the ones we make fun of in those Wallmart youtube funny videos (no disrespect to Wallmart) or buyers that require serious branding and established firms.

    As I’m the kind of person who just doesn’t sit and wait until someone else takes initiative I have addressed all issues in a letter sent not to Amazon support but to Amazon management. Hopefully, someone with the right experience, knowledge, and foresight will do something about it.

  9. Hi there,

    I need to share my recent experiences with EBC (our content hasn’t been approved yet after 3 submissions and 20 working days!) as I would like to make the life of the ones who will decide to undergo through the ‘paths of the underworld’ of EBC a bit better.

    I would first comment on the fact that it seems that the level of intelligence of some of the EBC people does not align with a common mortal’s average IQ.

    Their responses are generic and very confusing leaving the customer(seller) dazed and confused (Led Zeppelin πŸ™‚ ). Also, the fact that seller support has no clue of the inner workings of EBC adds to the daily frustration of a seller.

    Let’s get to the point. The first submission came back as they did not like the fact that on the images (that I paid a small fortune to create), had certifications by international organizations like Peta, Cruelty-free, Natural & Organic etc.

    As I had no other option by doing what they told me I removed them. I got the same response back. I send them a letter asking them to give me specific information of what their issue was as their generic response just did not make sense, but after 48 hours of no response I realized that the label of my product(s) carried 3 certifications that you would need the Hubble telescope (literally) to be able to read them.

    As I was not willing to invest millions in changing the labeling (I’m not a private label I’m a brand with over 150 products) I asked my graphic design team to Photoshop the labels and remove the certifications (to my absolute dismay and disgust as I’m now forced to alter my branding). I have also altered the text of the EBC to the point that it almost doesn’t make sense as part of our ‘Branding’ links to the lifestyle, the culture and the ethics we promote as a company. (We thought that EBC was available to us to ENHANCED the CONTENT of our BRAND and not just blabber with lots of technicalities that sometimes don’t make sense to the potential buyer)

    I have removed text that refers to our association(s) (not links) with international organizations like the FAIRTRADE – that cares about children labour and proper work environment for people the Global Shea Alliance (which makes sure that women are paid fairly and not mistreated), organizations like the Fauna & Flora International (FFI) that keep the earth clean and the seas free of stuff bad for the marine life etc.

    Organisations which we are proud to assist financially and be part of, that is our Brand’s culture and mission, just to satisfy the EBC rules that will not allow us to pass the message out there that we care about the environment and what our customers put on their skin (yes we are beauty products – but I will not mention our name as I’m making a statement here and not a promotion)

    I’m not usually complaining when it comes to business. Huge organizations like Amazon have the right to have their own rules and regulations and the ones who wish to do business with them should abide by their TOS. But when it comes to logic and knowledge I’m disgusted that young children with probably no academic credentials reply to us with generic emails and tell us that we are not allowed to Enhance our Brand our way which we know darn well that is the correct way as we are addressing intelligent potential customers and not plain average consumers.

    Final verdict. If this time I get another little kid answering with a generic message the same way without explaining I will just discard the EBC thought. I’d rather inform the potential buyer properly than follow rules that go against my decades of business experience. I will also address this with Amazons management as they don’t get to dictate how we decide to do our branding.

    With the utmost respect to your website and the fact that you are trying to help

    (I have to mention this! A person from seller support suggested I remove my Brand’s logo from the images as this would most probably make my application much easier to be approved :). I told the kid politely that he had no clue of what he was talking about !)

    1. Hey there Chris,

      Wow what an in-depth account of your experience. I appreciate you are frustrated with Seller Support (many private labelers share this frustration), and we’re always open to hear of people’s experiences good and bad.

      I have only used EBC myself before the new brand registry came into play, but I did also find that they were very strict and that there was someone behind the scenes checking each submission and revision. There were plenty of things that I previously had in the regular listing that I had to take out for EBC just so Amazon would approve it.

      This is a pain, and it does mean that you have to weigh up the worth of EBC, vs having specific things in your listing (like logos, certificates, guarantees or quality promises for example). I can see how this would become extremely frustrating for existing brands who have 100s of SKU’s with predefined branding and packaging. Generally it is worth it for private label sellers who have 5-10 products, and want to enter brand registry and make their listing stand out.

      I presume Amazon want to stop people from putting false information on product listings, which would be harmful for their customers. Understandable, but frustrating that there is no structure in place for sellers who do have legitimate certifications for their products.

      Thanks for sharing your experience with the community, and let us know how you get on with approaching Amazon about this topic.

      Kym

      1. Decided to let you guys (and your readers) know that we finally made it. We have now been approved and our content is up there. Feeling a bit wounded as we made some changes on our label (photoshop-ed them of course) but “C’est la vie” (Such is life) as the French say. If you can’t beat them join them.

        Through of all these obstacles, I gained one great ‘tip’ I would like to share with your readers as a ‘Christmas Present’ :). A big part of my frustration was the fact that (mostly) on seller support I had to talk to non-English native speakers as myself (I’m greek but I think I mastered the English language at an early age). It was extremely hard to make them understand my issues. Well, today a great support person from the US of A (praise Annette – that was her name) told me that if I have an issue of this sort I could use the magic phrase ‘I NEED TO TALK TO A US REPRESENTATIVE’. Once you invoke these words it’s like you are in possession of Harry Potter’s magic wand (yes I have children and I have gone through these books a million times). It seems that the ‘out of US support centers’ have this internal secret instruction that once a seller invokes this phrase they either have to transfer you to a US support center or they will put a callback request and you will receive a call from someone that has that “L’ Americaine” accent.

        So there you go a gift from me to all of you.

        Thanks for listening to my pain and sorrow :). I have another 13 issues to solve with seller support, therefore, I’ll just get ready, put my armor, ride my ‘Rocinante’ (Don Quixote’s horse) and prepare to battle the windmills of evil.

        C.

        1. Great news C,

          Really glad you managed to get to the bottom of this πŸ™‚

          Thanks for the tip – that’s a great one to use when getting totally stuck with seller support. We’ve definitely all been there!

          Thanks for sharing your story and insights with the community, and have a great Christmas!

          Kym

  10. Hey Kym,

    What an awesome and really helpful article .. I have really enjoyed it and appreciate all that you and Jungle Scout do for us! πŸ™‚

    However, I have a one question on what you said about EBC listings not being indexed… Does this mean that if I switch from a regular listing to EBC… that all of the words written in the product description & product features section of the EBC listing will no longer be indexed?

    If you could please help me clarify this, it would be really great! Maybe I am just too much of an over analytical millennial, but would like to make sure about this..

    Thanks again & cheers πŸ™‚

    1. Hey David,

      Sure, great question.

      At the time of writing, EBC was pretty new and there was a lot of speculation that EBC content was not indexed. Meaning that the Amazon search engine could not see the content on the EBC page to look for keywords etc.

      Since then, the advice that has been given is to ensure you always fill in your product listing information fields in the back-end of Seller Central in the same way you would if you did not use EBC, to ensure it gets indexed. We did launch EBC content for some of our listings and didn’t see any adverse affects on our rankings – but we had also filled out the usual fields for the product listing in Seller Central. So that’s my best advice.

      Also note that now the new Brand Registry has been launched, you will need to have a brand registered product to access EBC content. More on that topic here!

      Hope this helps

      Kym

  11. I noticed that you got the coveted Verdana font working on your EBC content. Can you share how to got it to do that? : )

    1. Hey Courtney – good question. I actually don’t know. Font is not something you can specify when building an EBC page so it’s just the way that Amazon have presented the content.

      I just took a look at another listing with EBC (https://www.amazon.com/Jungle-T-shirt-Organic-Cotton-X-Large/dp/B01MSSJM77/) and this looks like Arial font.

      I presume that it may be due to the different templates that you can choose when you build an EBC listing. Maybe try giving the same template as Jungle Stix a go?

      Let me know if you figure it out πŸ™‚

  12. Hi Kym,

    Great article. I just received Brand Registry approval and will be working on the EBC next.
    I looked on Amazon to see yours for Jungle Stix and I too thought it looked like the original page, so may I ask did you go back to it after all?

  13. Kym,

    Thanks for the response. Your data are consistent with others I’ve seen so far, but I’d be very interested to see if that changes over the course of the spring and summer (busy time for roasting sticks I’d assume).

    I really do wonder if the results would be different with a different type of product. Everything I’ve read thus far is regarding products similar to Jungle Stix, at least in the sense that they’re relatively low value and not highly differentiated. In that case, it seems reasonable not to expect a ton of impact from EBC… how much research are people doing before they buy a marshmallow roasting stick? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, but I suspect little. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if search rank and price are the two dominant variables there.

    Contrast that with a much higher value product where people are doing research – a laptop, a premium cooking appliance, anything that’s higher-end and where customers are looking for “the best”. In that case, the additional information in the EBC can help to communicate the brand’s message, further explain features and benefits, and ultimately overcome buying objections. I have no idea if this is actually what will happen, but it seems logical and ripe for testing. It also seems like the “last hope” for someone to find some value in EBC, since it seems to be pretty “meh” by most accounts, at least in terms of impact on sales.

    I may end up trying it on one of our lines just to test that hypothesis. I’d be open to sharing those results with your readers; let me know if that’s of interest to you.

    Regarding Amazon eventually charging for EBC, it’s something that is widely speculated. I’ve definitely seen it come up several times as I’ve been researching. I know one article specifically called this time in EBC a “promotional free period” and stated very matter-of-factly that it would be temporary. I’ve not seen anything directly from Amazon to confirm or deny this, but it does seem probably that Amazon would look to monetize the additional service.

    1. Hey Donald,

      No problem!

      You make some interesting speculations here. I agree it will be really good to see how it fares with Jungle Stix over Spring and Summer. I am sure we will be publishing updates or more content about this in the future, so if you do decide to go for it with one of your lines and want to share then that would be awesome!

      Another thing to bear in mind is that EBC is still so new, and sometimes it takes people a while to get used to that change too. Though A+ content has been around for some time, the EBC templates are different again. Either way, it’s definitely worth testing to figure out whether it works and what products it works for.

      Keep in touch πŸ™‚
      Kym

  14. Hi Kym,

    Great article on EBC. Any updates on the year-on-year performance of the Jungle Stix page? I’m considering trying EBC for our product, but the Amazon not indexing the content is disconcerting.

    I would suspect that if EBC was negatively impacting search that one would see a drop in overall page views. If EBC does anything, it should increase conversions. What the net results are for that combination likely is very dependent on the type of product; lower-value, impulse buy sort of purchases probably would see a net decline, while higher-priced, research-heavy purchases would probably see a net increase in sales.

    I’ve not seen anyone reporting a net increase yet, so I’m keen to see if anyone has had a good experience. My product is a higher-end, premium-priced product in a niche area, so I think that anything that can overcome objections will result in higher net sales for us. However, if no one can validate a higher conversion rate, it gets pretty hard to justify the effort in upgrading. Add to that the likely scenario that Amazon will be charging for this feature in the near future, and it’s more imperative that the conversion rate be dramatically increased by using EBC in order to justify it.

    1. Hey Donald,

      Great question, thanks for getting in touch. I am going to update this article soon but was waiting to gather more data first.

      I can give you an overview so far:

      – It’s been just over 10 weeks since the EBC content was pushed
      – Compared to the previous 10 week period (from November ’16 until January ’17), both the number of items sold and the conversion rate have decreased

      However, in order to check that this is not due to seasonality, I also ran the data for the same ten week period from Jan – March 2016.

      Again, the number of items sold and conversion rate were slightly lower this year, with the EBC content in place, compared to the same period in 2016. However, the difference is much less than compared to the previous 10 week period.

      I think we’re going to keep it going for a while longer to gain more conclusive results, but hopefully this gives you an insight so far.

      Out of interest, do you have any evidence or articles stating that Amazon will be charging for this feature, or is that speculation? πŸ™‚

  15. Kym,
    Your information is very helpful, but I don’t see my problem….
    I’m trying to build Enhanced Brand Content pages, and have run into a roadblock concerning font size.
    I typed my content directly on the Amazon edit page for EBC. I was denied due to font size and told to increase font and resubmit. The EBC pages don’t have a tool to modify font, so I copied to MS Word, modified, saved, copied and pasted back to the EBC page. Apparently, changes are not immediately displayed, so I submitted. After waiting 7 days, denied again. Any suggestions on HOW to successfully change the font size? Help desk is useless – no telephone support for this topic.

    1. Hey Susie,

      That sounds very strange – to be honest this isn’t a problem I have ran into with EBC so I don’t know the answer. You are correct that you can’t change the font size in the EBC editor. From my experience, you just insert plain text into the editor, and the size would be determined automatically. But you can use the WYSIWIG editor to add bold, italic, underline and bullet points.

      One thing I would suggest is pasting in your content without any formatting attached (you can do this from a basic text editor tool on a mac or a PC). Or, rewriting it into the EBC editor and do not paste anything in there. My thinking is that if you have pasted any formatted text in there (even just the odd word), it might be causing a problem. But that’s just a guess.

      Unfortunately, the best advice I can give is to persist with Amazon’s helpdesk.

      Let us know how you get on & good luck!

      Kym

    1. Hey Karen,

      Good question! If you check out Amazon’s guidelines for EBC content you can see what sizes the images should be (in pixels) for each template: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html/ref=ag_202102950_cont_202102930?ie=UTF8&itemID=202102950

      When I say high quality, I mean the images should be sharp and in focus, and well lit. Any images that are blurry, pixelated, too dark or contain distracting shadows wouldn’t look great in Enhanced Brand Content! I would highly recommend professional photography for EBC content.

      However, if you do need to take your own product photos, get out my guide here: https://www.junglescout.com/blog/amazon-product-photography-diy-product-images/

      Thanks for reading!
      Kym

  16. Hello Kym,

    I have understand your all words upon EBC. Could you please confirm, Is it mandatory to have a brand registry before implementation of EBC in product listing on Amazon?

    Have a blessed day!

    Regards,
    Anushi

    1. Hey Anushi,

      Awesome, glad you found it useful. Yes indeed, the EBC option is only available for private label products with Brand Registry at the moment.

      Thanks for reading,
      Kym

    1. Hey Scott,

      Thanks for reading! If you have brand registry you should be eligible – the option should appear underneath ‘Advertising’ in the main menu. If it hasn’t appeared for you, maybe contact Amazon to find out why you haven’t got this option yet?

      Let us know how you get on!

      Cheers,
      Kym

  17. Kym:
    Great blog post. I know you covered pros and cons, but what about the inability to use your great product, Splitly? I assume it cannot work because of the human review of each tiny revision to the EBC description in the future . . . . is that right? (Amazon is so annoying!)
    Thanks, MJR

    1. Hey Michael,

      Haha thank you for your comment. You are right yes, at the moment you can’t use Splitly and EBC together to split test your descriptions. As you said, there is the human review of the content. Plus, as EBC is still new, we don’t know if it will be something that sticks, or if Amazon would release the API for it.

      As a Splitly user you might find that you can leverage better results by continuing to test an ordinary product description. Would love to hear if you get any insights on this in the future!

      Thanks for reading
      Kym

  18. Hi Kim
    Thanks for the nice post!
    Just wandering how did you get this product into the Brand registry? Doesn’t Amazon require it should have the brand name on the packaging and on the “product itself” and they ask you to sent images of both?

    1. Hi Martin,

      Thanks for reading πŸ™‚ That’s right you will need to get the product into the Brand Registry. Here’s the info on Brand Registry from Amazon’s help pages…

      To complete an application, you will need to provide the following items:

      1. An image of your product packaging with branding visible on the packaging.
      2. An image of a product with your branding visible on the product itself.
      3. Link to an active website that displays your brand or products.

      If you are selling private label, this is highly recommended to protect your product, and now it means you can also access Enhanced Brand Content.

      https://www.junglescout.com/blog/protect-your-private-label-asset-by-registering-your-brand-with-amazon/

      Many thanks,
      Kym

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