Find and Fix Amazon Listing Issues Before They Cost Sales

A listing suppressed by Amazon does not send you an email. A title truncated at 75 characters does not throw an error. Bullet points over the limit still save, they just get cut off where the customer cannot see the rest. Most Amazon listing problems are silent. You find them when sales drop, or when a customer asks a question your bullet point was supposed to answer but never finished.

Rufusly's listing issues engine scans every product in your catalogue against a vocabulary of 23 known Amazon problems. Each issue is ranked by severity, surfaced on the dashboard in a "Needs Attention" ranking, and linked directly to the field in the product editor that needs fixing.

What the scanner checks

The scanner runs 22 checks across six categories. Each check is a binary pass/fail against a known Amazon rule or content quality threshold, not a subjective judgement.

Title

• Missing title: no title present at all.
• Title over limit: Amazon caps titles at 75 characters as of July 2026. Anything longer gets truncated in search results.
• Banned characters: certain characters (HTML entities, excessive punctuation) are rejected or stripped by Amazon.
• Promotional language: words like "sale", "discount", "limited offer" violate Amazon's style guide and can trigger suppression.

Bullets and description

• Missing bullets: fewer than three bullet points. Amazon recommends five; three is the minimum for a listing to look complete.
• Bullet over limit: any single bullet exceeding 250 characters.
• Missing description: no product description.
• Description over limit: description exceeding 2,000 characters.

Backend search terms and highlights

• Missing search terms: no backend search terms set.
• Backend bytes over: search terms exceeding Amazon's 250 byte limit (not characters, bytes, so accented characters count double).
• Missing highlights: Item Highlights not populated.
• Highlights over limit: any highlight exceeding 125 characters.

Images and A+ Content

• Missing image: no product images at all.
• Few images: fewer than six images. Amazon allows up to nine; most top-ranked listings in competitive categories use at least six.
• No A+ Content: no A+ Content present. A+ replaces the text description with a visual layout and is designed to improve conversion.

Content hygiene

• Placeholder in content: template placeholder text left in the listing (e.g. "Enter description here").
• Price wording: price references in the listing content, which Amazon prohibits.
• Sample row present: the example row from an Amazon template was submitted and created a ghost listing.

Amazon-reported issues

• Suppressed: Amazon has suppressed the listing entirely. This is the most urgent issue type.
• Image suppressed: one or more images have been removed by Amazon for policy violations.
• Amazon issue: any other issue Amazon reports through the API that does not map to a specific local check.

How severity ranking works

Every issue is assigned one of four severity levels: critical, high, medium, or low. Suppressed listings, missing images, and backend search terms over the byte limit are critical. Missing titles, titles over the character limit, and missing bullets are high. Missing highlights and few images are low. Suggestions like adding A+ Content are also low.

On the dashboard, the "Needs Attention" card sorts products using a two-axis ranking. The first axis is commercial tier: products that are blocked (suppressed with a live ASIN) rank above live listings, which rank above unlisted products (no ASIN) and dormant drafts. Within each tier, products are sorted by their worst severity, then by total issue count as a tiebreaker.

This means a suppressed product with one critical error always appears before a live product with five medium warnings.

Deep links from the dashboard to the editor

Each issue on the dashboard is a clickable chip. Clicking it opens the product editor, switches to the correct tab (content, images, or product info), focuses the field that triggered the issue, and displays a note explaining what is wrong and why it matters. The highlight clears when you interact with the field or after 15 seconds.

The link carries the issue code in the URL, so you can bookmark or share a direct link to a specific issue on a specific product.

AI-powered fixes for text issues

For issues with a clear text fix, the product editor offers a "Fix All with AI" button. It rewrites the affected fields using your product's listing data as context: the existing title, bullets, description, and any imported Amazon content. The rewrite respects the character limits that triggered the issue in the first place.

Not every issue can be fixed with AI. A suppressed listing needs a Seller Central case, not a rewrite. A missing image needs a photograph or a generated image, not text. For these, the scanner shows the consequence (why the issue matters) and, where relevant, a link to the right place to resolve it. See the Action Centre documentation for the full list of fixable and non-fixable issues.

How the scanner relates to the Listing Quality Score

The issues scanner and the Listing Quality Score (LQS) both appear in the product editor, but they measure different things. The scanner is a binary compliance check: either your title is over 75 characters or it is not. LQS is a numeric score from 0 to 100 that measures content quality more broadly, covering keyword density, length optimality, and readability.

They share the same character limits (75 for titles, 250 for bullets, 250 bytes for backend search terms) but are computed independently. A listing can have zero issues and still score poorly on LQS if the content is thin or repetitive. Conversely, a listing can score 85 on LQS but still have a critical issue if Amazon has suppressed it.

Limits and scope

The scanner checks up to 500 products per sweep. For most accounts this covers the entire catalogue. If you have more than 500 products, the sweep prioritises products with the worst issues first, so the "Needs Attention" ranking still shows the most urgent problems.

The character and byte limits used by the scanner (75-character title, 250-byte backend search terms, 250-character bullets, 2,000-character description) are based on the Amazon UK marketplace as at August 2026. Amazon changes these limits without notice, and limits can vary by product type. If a limit changes, the scanner is updated centrally rather than per-product.