What Hat Do You Wear on Amazon?
How to Bend (Not Break) the Rules on Amazon
Growing your Amazon business can be a difficult and frustrating experience but it can also be extremely rewarding if you do it right! There are always new hacks and tricks to get your listing to the top of the page for your target search terms but sometimes they hacks can get you flagged or in severe cases, banned!
White Hat Tactics
Amazon has Terms of Service (TOS) set in place to guide sellers in optimizing their product listings in a way that they view acceptable. When optimization strategies are deemed acceptable by Amazon they are referred to as “white hat.” White Hat tactics are strategies that are in compliance with Amazon’s TOS. Although following the rules is great, if you use 100% white hat tactics, you will see limited growth on Amazon versus your competitors.
Black Hat Tactics
The opposite end of the spectrum of white hat practices are what they call “black hat.” These are tactics that are considered 100% non compliant with Amazon’s guidelines. Practicing black hat tactics can cause you to lose your selling permissions or potentially get sued by Amazon.
Examples of Black Tat Tactics
Opening More Than Seller Central Account: It is ok to have a personal shopping Amazon with a different email address from your Seller Central Account, but you never want to set up more than one Seller Central Account with different email addresses. Amazon will track you down and identify you. It is best to reach to request permission to set up another seller central account.
Fake Reviews: Amazon has cracked down hard this year to assure that shoppers only see legitimate product reviews. You should not pay for fake reviews, hire companies who offer you this service, or ask your family and friends to leave reviews for you. Amazon has an effective way of assessing whether or not a review was paid for, biased, or incentivized. If you are caught harvesting fake reviews your account can get suspended or banned. Once you are banned as a seller Amazon will not allow you back onto their platform.
Competitor Manipulation: Some Amazon sellers play dirty and instead of taking the time to improve their own listings they manipulate competitor listings to damage their rankings. Manipulation methods include purchasing the competition’s product, returning it, and then leaving a negative review on it. Buying a competitors product and reporting it as counterfeit after receiving the product. Voting negative reviews as helpful or filing A to Z claims against a competitor product.
We suggest avoiding black hat tactics so that you don’t get banned by Amazon. If you are interested, there is a hat you can wear that is middle ground between white hat and black hat tactics.
Grey Hat Tactics
We encourage exploring optimization strategies that are not as heavily policed or frowned upon by Amazon. The worst that can happen with grey hat tactics is a bot will suppress your listing and you will have to make the necessary changes to get your listing back up and running.
Examples of Grey Hat Tactics
Optimizing Your Main Image: Amazon requires that your main image that is seen on the search page must be of your product only, on a white background, with no text or other design elements. We often add banners, texts and callouts on our main images to catch the eye of Amazon shoppers. If you are going to do this you need to make sure any text or other design elements are at least 5 pixels from the 4 edges.
Bullet Point Emojis: I’m sure you’ve seen it before on different Product Detail Pages, the adorable emojis at the beginning of a bullet point, or somewhere within the copy. For whatever reason Amazon restricts the use of emojis but it is one of the easiest hacks to get away with. We have listings with emojis in the bullets that have been live for years with no issue. If we get suppressed we will simply remove the emoji and move on with our day.
The Slash: Amazon restricts the use of special characters such as: “ — ” “ / ” “ | ” “ : ” in your titles. Using the slash after the first words in your title can help with Google SEO because it triggers Google to add it in their search results. For example: Fayfaire Muslin Swaddle Blanket for Baby | Perfect 100% Organic Cotton Boutique Quality Newborn Blanket | Psalm 139:13-14
There are plenty of strategies you can use to optimize your listings on Amazon without raising any major red flags or completely going against your moral code. At Elevate, we have never had an account shut down by using grey hat tactics. All of these tactics are pretty innocent so you can implement them with peace of mind knowing that you are not risking getting banned from your Seller Central Account as you would with black hat tactics. So, what hat will you decide to wear?
If you need help deciding which strategies are the best for your brand in order to see growth on Amazon, please schedule a free consultation with us today!