Every week, the EtailDetail team take a moment to share some of tips, tricks, or things they’ve noticed during their time deep in the product content mines. We hope you find these nuggets of knowledge interesting, and check back for more in the future!
Keeping Character Limits in Mind
It’s accepted knowledge that avoiding huge blocks of text is an excellent way to ensure your customers engage with your product content. Add in formatting and page-speed considerations, and it’s not hard to see why Amazon impose character limits on all of their A+ modules.
These limits are usually pretty generous too, so you will rarely find yourself constrained by them. However, there is a specific situation that we keep seeing over the years, and one that often leads to awkward cropping of sentences and paragraphs to make the content fit within the Amazon templates.
Translation Troubles
Let’s say the USP of your new product is an unfamiliar one. Revolutionary, sure, but it needs to be adequately explained to the consumer so they can fully grasp the unique concept and the benefits. You spend weeks crafting the perfect messaging for your packaging, your advertising, and for your product content. What’s more, it even fits (just!) with Amazon’s character limit! All that’s left now is to run it through localisation…
I’m sure you’ve all now seen the issue. Amazon standardise character limits across multiple regions, and although your expertly worded English description may fit, there’s a very good chance the Spanish one won’t. Or the French, German, Italian…
It’s always recommended to work with your localisation/translation teams and make them aware of the limitations of the platforms you’re publishing content to. Otherwise, it’s all too easy for them to inadvertently fall afoul of restrictions, limits and prohibitions of certain words or phrases. You could very well find yourself facing a tight deadline, either struggling to find a translator or cutting out entire sentences in order to make your content fit.
