Customers come to Amazon.com to shop for products. They can find your products in two ways: browsing or searching. Most often customers use a combination of browse and search. Make sure customers can find your products either way. You can drive traffic by providing search terms and item type keywords (for browsing).
Thousands of sellers offer millions of products on Amazon.com. To help customers find products easily, Amazon developed a detailed product hierarchy or browse-tree structure. Customers refine by category and subcategory links until they reach the most specific product type.
Amazon uses Item Type Keywords to classify products under the correct browse nodes. In order for your products to continue to appear when customers refine their category options, they must be classified to the deepest level. This means that polo shirts should be classified as polo-shirts and not just as shirts or clothing.
Start with the item to classify and refer to the Clothing & Accessories Browse Tree Guide (BTG) and Valid Values table from the inventory file template for the appropriate and relevant keywords. BTGs are category-specific documents that provide specific keywords for your products.
For example, to classify a women's petite skinny jean, you would follow these steps:
Search terms help customers find your products. Your product titles and company name are already searchable, so think about other words that describe your product.
Think like Amazon customers when choosing your terms; use words they might enter into the search bar, including synonyms.
If you are using inventory file templates to upload your product data, the search term fields appear as search-terms1, search-terms2,, and so on. For more information about how to create effective search terms, see Using Search & Browse.
If you use XML to upload your product data, learn about Classifying Your Products using XML.