Amazon Title & Backend Keyword Character / Byte Counter

Worked example: 245 characters that cost 260 bytes

A mug seller is filling in backend search terms for Amazon.es. The draft looks safe — an ordinary character counter says 245, five short of 250. Paste it into the field above and the counter reads 260 / 250 bytes with the note “Over the limit by 10 bytes. Amazon will not index any of these search terms until you trim to 250 bytes or fewer.” The whole field is dead, not just the last few words.

taza cerámica hecha a mano ☕ jarra café artesanal gres esmaltado regalo cumpleaños tazón desayuno cerámica artesanal taza té porcelana rústica cocina campestre juego café hecho a mano regalo para él ella tazas únicas decoración rústica artesanía

The 15 surplus bytes are easy to account for: the draft contains 13 accented letters (á, é, í, ñ, ó, ú) at one extra byte each, plus the ☕ at two extra bytes. Dropping the emoji and the words that were already repeated — cerámica, artesanal, café, rústica, hecho a mano — buys back enough room to add six fresh keywords and still land under the cap:

taza cerámica hecha a mano jarra café artesanal gres esmaltado regalo cumpleaños tazón desayuno té porcelana rústica cocina campestre juego para él ella tazas únicas decoración artesanía boda aniversario hogar alfarería vidriado mate

Nothing here applies to the title or the bullets — those are measured in characters, so the same emoji would cost exactly one of your 200. Bytes only bite in the backend field.

"Amazon won't let me list." Which limit have you actually hit?

Three unrelated mechanisms get called an "Amazon listing limit", and sellers routinely diagnose the wrong one — which is why so much advice on the subject is useless. The counter above handles exactly one of them. Work out which wall you are standing in front of before you do anything else, because the fix for one is the opposite of the fix for another.

• A field limit. Your text is too long. Characters in the title and bullets, UTF-8 bytes in the backend search terms. This is what the tool on this page measures, and it is the only one of the three that is a property of your listing rather than your account.
• A listing limit. A cap on how many new ASINs you may create in a week. A volume throttle. It applies regardless of what you are selling.
• Gating. Permission to sell in a category, in a brand, or on a specific ASIN at all. A locked door, not a throttle.

Symptom: the form rejects your copy, or your keywords silently do nothing

This is the field-limit case and it is the easy one. Either Amazon refuses the save with a length error, or — worse, because it is silent — the listing saves fine and the backend search terms are never indexed. That second failure has no error message at all: go one byte over 250 and Amazon drops the whole field, not the overflow. Paste the text above and you will see the byte count rather than the character count, which is the distinction that catches out anyone selling in Spanish, German, French or any language with accents.

One thing on this page is about to date: the title counter here still measures against the 200-character allowance that has applied since January 2025. From 27 July 2026 Amazon caps titles at 75 characters including spaces in every category except media, and adds a searchable 125-character Item Highlights field, so use the 75-character title checker for titles and this tool for the bullets and the backend field. If you are rewriting rather than just measuring, the order to cut attributes in and where the detail you remove is meant to go covers the part a counter cannot.

Symptom: "you have reached your ASIN creation limit for this week"

Now you are in listing-limit territory, and nothing about your text will change the outcome. Amazon's own framing is that sellers are subject to weekly ASIN creation limits to protect the customer shopping experience, and that these limits remain until you establish a sales history. Read that carefully, because it tells you both the cause and the cure. The cause is that you are new and unproven; the cure is sales, not paperwork.

There is a second trigger that surprises established sellers, and Amazon states it plainly: if you have a large number of listings without sales, your ability to create new listings may be restricted. This is the one that bites catalogue-flooders and print-on-demand sellers who upload hundreds of designs and wait. From Amazon's side the logic is obvious — shelf space that never sells is a cost — but the effect is that the strategy of listing everything and seeing what sticks eventually throttles itself. If that is your situation, deleting or consolidating dead listings and concentrating on the ones that convert is the actual remedy.

What nobody can tell you is the number. Amazon does not publish a starting weekly allowance, and the figures you will see quoted in forums and blog posts are guesses extrapolated from a handful of accounts. It varies, it moves, and anyone printing a specific number is inventing precision. What is consistent is the shape: the cap relaxes on its own as sales accumulate, there is no self-service button to raise it, and if it is genuinely blocking a launch the route is a case with Seller Support explaining the inventory you are ready to sell. As of July 2026 that remains the position.

Symptom: "you need approval to list in this category" or against this brand

Different system entirely. Gating is a permission barrier applied at category, brand or individual-ASIN level, and it is lifted by document review rather than by trading. The application typically asks for invoices from your supplier dated within roughly the last 90 days, covering a meaningful quantity, with the supplier's contact details on them and the buyer name matching your registered Seller Central business name exactly. Mismatched business names and receipts instead of invoices are the two most common rejections.

The reason conflating the two mechanisms is so costly: they are independent. You can be fully ungated in a category and still unable to create the listing because you are at your weekly cap. You can have years of sales history, no listing limit at all, and still be stopped dead by a gated brand. Sending supplier invoices to Seller Support when your problem is a weekly ASIN cap achieves nothing, and waiting patiently for sales to accumulate when your problem is gating achieves nothing either.

How to tell them apart in thirty seconds

• Does the error name a category, a brand or an ASIN? That is gating. Amazon will normally offer an "Apply to sell" or "Request approval" path from the error itself — if there is a form to fill in, it is a permission problem.
• Does the error mention a count, a week, or a limit on new ASINs? That is a listing limit. There will be no application form, because there is nothing to prove.
• Can you list the same product on an existing ASIN by matching to it? If matching works but creating a new ASIN does not, you are throttled on creation rather than barred from the category.
• Did the listing save and then behave strangely? Nothing was blocked at all — that is a field limit or a content problem, and it is the case this page's counter is for.

None of this is visible to a browser tool. The counter above reads the text you paste and nothing else: it has no connection to Seller Central, cannot see your account, and cannot tell you your remaining ASIN allowance or your gating status. Those live in Seller Central, and account-level policies change — treat the descriptions here as orientation, current as of July 2026, and check the specifics against your own account before acting on them.

Frequently asked questions