As you probably already know, your product description plays a huge role in your sales online. Along with your title, photos, and videos, product descriptions compel shoppers to click that buy now button.
But there seems to be a lot of confusion as to whether HTML is actually allowed in Amazon descriptions.
According to Amazon’s product detail page rules, it states:
“Do not include HTML, DHTML, Java, scripts, or other types of executables in your detail pages.”
But what’s confusing is that Amazon’s system still allows you to input HTML into your product description field, despite saying not to. So, as usual, it appears this is just one of the many instances of Amazon saying one thing but not enforcing it.
So what do I recommend?
I think as long as you’re fine with the chance of Amazon possibly contacting you, adding HTML into your product description is a great way to boost conversions. In fact, plenty of Amazon sellers do it.
Let’s be honest, Amazon’s plain text description format leaves a lot to be desired. Here is the default description format below:
As you can see, all the text is bunched together which makes it hard to read. This leads to lower conversions. But since Amazon’s system allows for basic HTML formatting in the description, it can make a huge difference in boosting your sales.
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How to add HTML to your Amazon product description
The secret to creating an effective product description is to make it clear, descriptive, and easy to read. By adding a few simple HTML tags, you can break up large chunks of text, highlight important info, and improve readability.
Here’s a quick guide for the basic HTML tags you can include in your description:
Bold/ Strong Tags: <b> </b>
This tag allows you bold text. Everything in between these tags becomes bold. This is a great tag if you want to highlight something important in your description. For example:
<b>Humpty Dumpty</b> sat on the wall.
This appears as:
Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.
Line Break: <br>
This tag allows you to break up lines of text. It lets you start a new line immediately following the previous line of text.
Example:
Let’s say you want to have the two sentences to appear as below:
Jack and Jill Went up the hill To fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.
Hitting the enter key between the two sentences isn’t going to do anything in your description. To break up the two lines, you would have to enter it like this:
Jack and Jill Went up the hill To fetch a pail of water,<br>Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.
This would result in this:
Jack and Jill Went up the hill To fetch a pail of water,
Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.
Paragraph Break <p> </p>
Another option to line breaks is paragraph breaks. However, the main difference between these two tags is that the paragraph break adds some extra padding between each line of text. Similar to the line break, paragraph breaks are great to break up text and make your description easier to read.
Example:
Say you want the text to look like this:
The wheels on the bus go round and round Round and round, round and round.
The wheels on the bus go round and round All through the town.
To do this, you would include the paragraph tags like this:
<p>The wheels on the bus go round and round Round and round, round and round.</p>The wheels on the bus go round and round All through the town.
This would give us this:
The wheels on the bus go round and round Round and round, round and round.
The wheels on the bus go round and round All through the town.
As you can see, the paragraph tag adds some extra padding between the two lines of text.
You can even combine multiple tags in your description. For example, you could include bold fonts, link breaks, and paragraphs as follows:
<p>The wheels on the <b>bus</b> go round and round Round and round, round and round.</p> The wheels on the <b>bus</b> go round and round <br>All through the town.
This would look like:
The wheels on the bus go round and round Round and round, round and round.
The wheels on the bus go round and round
All through the town.
Bullet Point Lists: <ul>, <ol> & <li>
These tags allow you to create bullet or numbered points in your description. The ul tag means “unordered list”. Everything in between these tags will be in bullet points, while the li tags separates each bullet point. To create bullet points, here’s what we would put in:
<ul>
<li> Point 1 </li>
<li> Point 2 </li>
</ul>
This would give us this:
- point 1
- point 2
If you wanted to create numbered bullet points, we would use the OL tag instead.
<ol>
<li> Point 1 </li>
<li> Point 2 </li>
<li> Point 3 </li>
</ol>
Which would give us this:
-
- point 1
- Point 2
- Point 3
See, that wasn’t too difficult, was it?
To summarize
By adding just a few basic HTML tags, you can dramatically enhance your product description and increase the chances of your product being sold.
As mentioned, Amazon only allows for basic HTML so there are limitations as to how much formatting you can do to your description. So, unfortunately, you can’t embed any photos or videos or do other fancy things in your description.
If you’re looking for more ways to give your product descriptions a boost, check out my other post. And if you’ve enjoyed this article, let me know in the comments below.
