Amazon, Shopify and Etsy listings that sell

You're selling already, but the numbers don't match the traffic. A listing gets clicks and stalls at the basket. Another never surfaces in search and you can't work out why a near-identical competitor sits above you. Most listings that "look fine" lose sales on a handful of fixable gaps, not one big mistake.

Listing optimisation is the work of making a product page do two jobs: rank in marketplace search, and convert the people who see it — a clear, keyword-led title, images that answer real buyer questions, a scannable description, visible returns and shipping, and a reviews strategy. We audit yours, show you exactly where they leak, and fix them.

This page is about the listings themselves — Amazon, Shopify and Etsy. If you need the store built first, that's e-commerce stores; if you need traffic driven to it, that's a separate paid-ads engagement. Listing optimisation is the organic layer in between: getting found, and getting chosen.

Who this is for

You're selling already. Products move, but not the way the traffic suggests they should. Maybe a listing gets clicks and stalls at the basket. Maybe it never surfaces in search at all and you can't work out why a near-identical competitor sits above you. Maybe you've heard "A+ Content" and "listing quality score" thrown around and you're not sure which actually move the needle for a business your size.

That's the moment this work pays off. Online retail isn't a side channel any more — online sales made up 28.6% of all retail sales in Great Britain in November 2025, up from 28.4% in October, with online sales values up 8.3% on the same month a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics. And the marketplaces are where the small businesses are: around 100,000 UK small and medium-sized businesses sell on Amazon, and UK small businesses on Amazon recorded over £3.8 billion in export sales in 2024 on Amazon UK's own figures. The competition for the buyer's eye on a results page is real, and the listing is the whole pitch.

What separates a listing that sells from one that stalls

There's no mystery to it. The same elements show up on every page that converts, and the same ones are missing from the pages that don't. Independent UX research from the Baymard Institute, updated in March 2026, found that only 48% of desktop and 38% of mobile leading US and European e-commerce sites achieve decent or good product-page UX — measured across more than 30,000 usability scores on 155+ benchmarked sites. The other half are mediocre or worse. Even large retailers get this wrong, which is exactly why a smaller seller who gets it right can punch above their weight.

A listing that does the job has:

• A title that leads with what people search, not what you'd call it internally. The words a buyer types, in the order a buyer types them, without keyword-stuffing the rest into noise.
• Images that answer the silent questions. Top of that list: scale. Baymard found 42% of users try to judge a product's size from its images, yet 28% of sites give no in-scale image showing the product against a recognisable reference (Baymard, 2017). One photo of the thing next to a hand, a room, or a standard object removes a real reason to hesitate.
• A description in highlights, not a wall of prose. Baymard found 78% of sites don't use a highlights or bullet-point format for descriptions (2018), and 10% of the largest sites don't keep description detail consistent across their range (2021). Scannable beats eloquent.
• Returns and shipping you don't have to hunt for. 64% of users look for returns information on the product page itself; 44% of sites don't show or link to it there; and 13% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase purely over an unsatisfactory returns policy (Baymard). A plain-English returns line near the buy button is cheap insurance.
• A reviews strategy that includes the negative ones. 87% of sites don't respond to negative reviews on their product pages (Baymard, 2019). Replying calmly to a critical review reassures the next ten readers far more than the perfect five-star average does.

None of this is exotic. It's the boring, specific work most sellers never get round to — and the gap between a fine listing and an optimised one is usually four or five of these, not a redesign.

Platform by platform

The principles travel; the levers don't. Each marketplace ranks and rewards listings differently, so the work is platform-specific.

Amazon — Brand Registry, A+ Content and the conversion levers

Amazon rewards brands. If you own one, enrolling in Amazon Brand Registry unlocks the tools that move conversion. Eligibility needs an active registered trade mark or a pending application — a word mark, or a design mark containing words, letters or numbers — and your brand name or logo permanently affixed to the product or its packaging (Amazon UK). In the UK that's a UKIPO mark; a pending application counts.

Once you're enrolled, A+ Content is the main lever. Amazon reports that basic A+ Content can encourage repeat purchases and increase sales by up to 8%, and that well-implemented Premium A+ Content can increase sales by up to 20%. Those are Amazon's own figures for the feature, not a promise for your specific catalogue — but they tell you where the platform points sellers. Premium A+ adds richer modules: full-width images, video, and a shoppable comparison chart. Amazon has said its shoppable Premium A+ comparison chart module had a 2x higher cart conversion rate than the non-shoppable version, with more than a quarter of customers who clicked a shoppable chart adding an item to the basket straight from it (Amazon, circa 2022 — a stated benefit of the module, not a current-year benchmark).

Premium A+ rewards a brand that's done the groundwork. Amazon's documented eligibility expects a Brand Story module published across all your brand-owned listings, plus five approved A+ Content modules in the previous twelve months. So the sensible route is: register the brand, build out solid basic A+ across the range, then step up to Premium. We do the enrolment and the build, and we'll tell you plainly where you are on that path.

Shopify — your own house, your own SEO

On Shopify you own the storefront, which means you also own the discoverability. Around a third of product searches start on third-party platforms like Amazon or Google Shopping rather than a brand's own site (Statista, via Shopify), so a Shopify product page has to earn its place in Google as well as convert the visitor who lands on it.

Two things matter most here. First, product structured data — the markup that lets Google show rich results with price, availability and ratings. Google's own documentation cites Nestlé measuring an 82% higher click-through rate on rich-result pages and Rotten Tomatoes measuring 25% higher on structured-data pages. Google is clear that structured data isn't a direct ranking signal and these are named case studies rather than averages you should expect — but richer results that earn more clicks are worth having, and the same markup is increasingly how AI shopping assistants read your products. Shopify notes that assistants including Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity rely on schema markup to parse and recommend products. Getting the schema right is a small job with a long tail of upside.

Second, speed. Shopify, citing research from Portent, reports that a site loading in one second converts at five times the rate of one loading in ten. Page speed is a conversion lever, not just a technical box-tick.

Etsy — the conversion-driven quality score

Etsy is the most explicit of the three about how it ranks. Its stated search factors are keyword relevance; a listing quality score based on conversion (clicks, favourites and purchases); a recency boost for new and renewed listings; customer service and shop quality (review rating, message response rate and case rate over a rolling three months); and shipping price — Etsy has prioritised US domestic shipping under $6 since October 2024 (a US-specific threshold; UK sellers should read it as "competitive shipping helps", not a fixed number).

The two factors you control most directly are relevance and that conversion-based quality score — which is why getting the listing right at launch matters. Etsy also notes that using all ten available listing images may increase your conversion rate, because each extra image gives shoppers more to go on. The quality score is a flywheel: a listing that converts ranks higher, which brings more traffic, which converts. Optimisation is how you start it turning.

What we do

We work in two passes, then hand you a plan you could action yourself or have us deliver.

1. Discoverability audit. How findable is each listing in its marketplace's search, and why. Titles, keywords, category and attribute completeness, and — on Shopify — the technical SEO and structured data that decide whether Google shows you at all.

2. Content and trust audit. How well each listing converts the people who see it, scored against the specific gaps the research keeps surfacing: the missing in-scale image, the prose-wall description, the buried returns line, the unanswered reviews. You get a per-listing, mapped list of what's wrong and what it's costing you in plausible terms — not a generic checklist.

3. Platform-specific enhancements. The fixes, done. On Amazon: Brand Registry enrolment, A+ and Premium A+ builds. On Shopify: on-page SEO, product schema, and the page-speed and content fixes that lift conversion. On Etsy: titles, tags, images and the listing-quality levers. Plus a clear image brief telling whoever shoots your photography exactly which shots are missing and why.

What's included: the audits, the written plan, the on-platform changes, the image brief, and the A+ / schema builds where they apply.

What's not: we don't run paid advertising (Amazon PPC, Etsy Ads or Google Shopping are a separate engagement), we don't shoot product photography ourselves (we brief and coordinate it), and we won't pretend listing work fixes a problem it can't. If sales are stalling because of price, product, brand trust or delivery, optimisation is one lever among several and we'll say so. It's the cheapest one to pull first, and often the one that's been left untouched.

Optimise first, then advertise

It's tempting to buy traffic when sales are slow. But paid ads send people to the same page — if that page converts poorly, you're paying to fill a leaky bucket. The Baymard Institute puts the average cart-abandonment rate at 70.22% across 50 published studies, with abandoners citing extra costs (39%), slow delivery (21%), payment-security worries (19%) and an unsatisfactory returns policy (15%) among the top reasons. Several of those are listing and page problems, not traffic problems.

Organic optimisation compounds: it improves relevance and conversion without ongoing spend, and on Etsy and Amazon a better-converting listing earns better ranking, which earns more free traffic. The sensible order is to fix the page, then advertise into it once it converts. (Baymard also estimates large sites can gain up to a 35.26% conversion increase through better checkout design — a category-wide potential across a whole site, not a number to expect from one listing, but a sense of how much is left on the table.)

Proof

We're a small UK business ourselves, so we'll be straight about evidence rather than dress it up.

• Our work: the two we can point to are design-led Amazon A+ Content stories — Manuka Doctor and CJC Gains — where we rebuilt the listing content to answer buyer questions and reflect the brand. They're qualitative examples of the work, not headline numbers; for measured before-and-after results, our position rests on the evidence above.
• Documented third-party results we can point to honestly: Google's own documentation cites Nestlé at 82% higher click-through and Rotten Tomatoes at 25% higher click-through from structured data — named case studies, not guarantees, but real, vendor-published numbers. Amazon's own reported figures for A+ Content (up to 8% basic, up to 20% for well-implemented Premium A+) tell you where the platform itself sees the upside.

When we audit your listings we'll show you the gaps against the same research cited above — annotated, on your actual pages — so the case for the work is yours to see, not ours to assert.

Common questions

Do I need a trade mark to use A+ Content on Amazon? Yes. A+ Content requires Amazon Brand Registry, and Brand Registry needs a registered or pending trade mark (UKIPO in the UK) plus your brand affixed to the product or packaging. Registry also unlocks other tools like Brand Stores. If you don't have a brand registered, that's the first step — and one we can help with.

What's the difference between basic and Premium A+ Content? Basic A+ is available to every Brand Registry holder and, on Amazon's figures, can lift sales up to 8%. Premium A+ adds richer modules — shoppable comparison charts, full-width images, video — and Amazon reports it can lift sales up to 20%. Premium has conditions: a Brand Story module on all your listings and five approved A+ modules in the previous twelve months. So you grow into it.

Will optimising my listings help them show up in Google, not just on the marketplace? For Shopify, yes, fairly directly — product structured data enables rich results in Google (price, availability, ratings), and the same markup helps AI assistants like Gemini and Perplexity read your products. Note Google treats structured data as enabling rich results, not as a direct ranking boost. Amazon and Etsy listings are indexed by Google too, but you influence their visibility through the platform's own levers more than through site-level SEO.

How many images should a listing have? As many distinct, genuinely useful ones as the platform allows. The recurring gap isn't quantity, it's the in-scale image — the one that shows your product against a recognisable reference. Etsy says using all ten of its image slots may improve conversion. Aim for variety that answers real buyer questions rather than hitting a number.

Does this only help new sellers, or listings that are already selling? It's often most valuable for listings that already get traffic but convert poorly — you've got baseline data, and optimisation attacks the weak conversion score directly. For brand-new listings, doing the same work before launch maximises the day-one quality signal, which matters during Etsy's early recency boost especially.

How important is the returns policy on a product page, really? More than most sellers assume. 64% of users look for returns information on the product page, 44% of sites don't show it there, and 13% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase over an unsatisfactory returns policy (Baymard). A short, plain-English returns summary near the buy button removes a real objection. On Amazon it's platform-controlled; on Shopify and Etsy it's yours to fix.

What's the difference between listing optimisation and paid ads like Amazon PPC? Optimisation improves your organic relevance and conversion without ongoing spend, and it compounds. Paid ads drive traffic regardless of rank — but to the same page, so a poorly converting listing just wastes budget faster. Optimise first, advertise second. We cover the organic levers; paid is a separate engagement.

How you work with us

This work fits either way we work: as a one-off project to fix a defined set of listings, or as part of an ongoing monthly plan where we keep improving listings as you add products and the marketplaces change their rules. See pricing for the monthly plans and our custom project rate.

Send us your three worst-performing listings

Pick the three listings that frustrate you most — the ones with traffic that won't convert, or that never surface in search — and send them over. We'll audit them against everything on this page and show you, listing by listing, exactly what's holding them back. No charge, no slide deck.

Get a free listing audit — send your three worst-performing listings and we'll show you what's holding them back.

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