Removal of HTML External Links in Product Descriptions
Amazon has chosen not to allow external links within product descriptions. This, of course, benefits Amazon, but not customers, where their choice of information to make a sale is limited.
I prepare my product feed file at the moment by submitting data from my eCommerce platform as an Excel file. My eCommerce product descriptions are full of useful internal and external links and it seems that these will need to be removed before adding the product descriptions to the Amazon Feed File.
As Amazon rejects records with links, has anyone found a way of getting Amazon to remove the links instead of rejecting the record?
3 replies
Seller_qZO3ZCjoBXEeL
No, you must submit a clean file to Amazon. I’d suggest doing so when you export from your eCommerce platform - most tools allow you to do this. Otherwise you’ll be looking at running a complex search and replace on your exported file in Excel.
Alternatively you may benefit having parallel product descriptions for your products - one for your site and a ‘clean one’ for third parties (who will all invariably strip or penalise off-site content).
Seller_tRuvBEHDedp4q
This is common practise. If you sell on ebay the same applies with them. You cannot have external links in the description. This is to stop off-site advertising or sales.
Sometimes all HTML has to be removed. Some sites allow some very limited HTML. But Amazon are not going to strip the HTML for you.
As PeterB has said it is best to either strip all HTML out of the description in the excel file you get from your eCommerce site or keep a separate ‘clean’ description field you can use instead.
What eCommerce site are you using? If woocommerce then there are plugins you can use that will create your listings on Amazon from the products on your website without having to go through the export/upload to Amazon process (and will also strip out HTML from the description as it does)
