Hello again. After a month or so of relative quiet, Amazon Vendor Central (motto: “It’s always day one, with all the instability that would infer”) has changed again, adding a few more restrictions to your templated A+ content. What hath April wrought? Read on.
- A+ content is now limited to 1,200 words. Fortunately, that’s more than enough for just about every kind of product we write A+ content for.
- Headers are limited to 150 characters, including spaces (joining the 100-character captions in the “You can’t write everything here” club). This is also a solid choice–headers should be limited to a feature and a benefit and should be able to be scanned easily by even the most attention-deficient readers.
- When using Advanced Template 2, the product comparison chart is now limited to five columns and eight rows. But eight elements of five different products is still a pretty darn robust matrix, so no red flags here either.
Also of note: Amazon’s recent removal of warranty information. Amazon has always been a bit touchy about what kinds of products it would include warranty information for, but the total exclusion is a noteworthy change. We suspect it’s due to not being prepared (or simply not wanting) to deal with the inevitable customer service issues that come with the responsibility of communicating manufacturers’ policies.
We’ve dealt enough with complicated warranty information and the legal ramifications thereof to understand why they made this choice. (Spend a little time with an international company’s deep thicket of warranties tailored to the intricacies of half a dozen or more countries’ legal requirements, and you will too.)
What else has Amazon been up to lately? Well, they’re expanding same-day delivery in certain cities and zip codes (although still no drones in sight). They’re continuing their undeniably exceptional PR game by leaking details of the Amazon Phone. They’re probably strategizing in some buried South Lake Union bunker about what the rise of Alibaba might mean to them. And Gawker, of all sites, is trying to expose the weirdness of Amazon’s corporate culture–which, while always entertaining, is not exactly a scoop at this point.
