Text on Amazon Listing Images: What's Allowed and What Gets You Suppressed

Two things are true at once, and sellers keep collapsing them into one. Text is banned on the main image, and text is entirely normal in the gallery — that is the rule most people know. The rule most people miss is that Amazon's list of content it does not allow on a detail page names images as one of the places it applies, alongside titles, descriptions and bullets. So "the gallery allows text" is not the same as "the gallery allows any text." This post separates the two, and names the specific sentences that get a listing suppressed.

The one slot where text is simply banned

The main image is the strictest surface Amazon operates: pure white background at RGB 255,255,255, the product filling roughly 85% of the frame, and nothing added — no text overlays, no logos, no watermarks, no borders, no badges, no props that don't ship in the box. It is enforced hardest because it is the image that appears in search results, and because a machine can check most of it.

One distinction is worth stating plainly, because it causes a lot of unnecessary anxiety: text that is physically printed on the product or its retail packaging is part of the product. A bottle with its label on, a book cover, a box with the brand name moulded into the plastic — none of that is "text added to the image." What is banned is anything laid on top in an editor. If you are unsure which side of the line you are on, ask whether the text would still be there if you photographed the item on a table. For the full slot-one checklist see our main image rules guide.

What the prohibited list actually covers

Amazon's seller-facing Product Detail Page Guide sets out categories of content that may not appear in titles, descriptions, bullet points or images. Reproduced here as categories rather than as policy text:

Category	What it rules out on an image
Contact and web details	Phone numbers, postal or email addresses, website URLs — and by extension QR codes pointing off-platform
Availability, price, condition	"Only £19.99", "was €40", "in stock now", refurbished-versus-new callouts
Alternative ordering or delivery offers	"Order direct", "free delivery", links to your own shop
Reviews, quotes, testimonials	Star graphics, five-star screenshots, "customers say…", a quoted review pasted onto a slide
Soliciting positive reviews	"Love it? Leave us five stars" inserts, including the ones printed on cards and photographed
Advertising, promotional material, watermarks	Sale flashes, discount stickers, agency or photographer marks
Time-sensitive information	Dates, seasonal promos, "new for 2026", anything that expires

Read the middle rows again. Almost every seller who has ever built an infographic set has considered at least one of them — a price comparison, a review quote, a "free shipping" ribbon. They are the ones that look helpful and are policy violations — and image violations are one of the more common reasons a listing quietly stops appearing, as we cover in suppressed listings and images.

The claims that actually cost people listings

Three recur far more than the rest.

Ranking and badge claims. "#1 Best Seller", "Amazon's Choice", a rendered orange badge, a star rating. These fail twice: they are a review or ranking claim, and reproducing Amazon's own badges or interface elements uses Amazon's branding without permission. Never place anything that imitates an Amazon page element inside your own image.

Shipping and price promises. "Free shipping" belongs to the alternative-delivery-offer category and is not yours to promise on an image anyway — the delivery terms depend on the buyer's Prime status and marketplace. Prices in images also go stale the first time you run a deal, and a stale price on an image is a misleading-content problem, not just an embarrassment.

Absolute superlatives with no basis. "Best", "guaranteed", "100% satisfaction", "doctor recommended", "eco-friendly" with nothing behind it. Some of these cross into regulated-claim territory depending on category and marketplace: health, safety, food-contact and cosmetic claims are policed by more than Amazon. A claim you would not print on the retail box because your lawyer would object does not become safe because it is a JPEG.

None of this makes badges impossible. A certification you actually hold — GOTS, OEKO-TEX, CE, an FSC mark, a genuine third-party test result — is a legitimate, checkable thing to show. The test is whether you could produce the certificate on request.

The text worth putting on gallery images

Having subtracted, add. The gallery is where text earns its place, and the useful text is nearly always the answer to a question a shopper would otherwise have to hunt for:

Dimensions and capacity with units, in both metric and imperial where you sell in both. Our dimensions image guide covers how to lay these out.
Materials and construction: "304 stainless steel", "100% merino, 18.5 micron".
Compatibility and fit: what it works with, what it does not.
What is in the box, counted.
How it is used, in numbered steps, when the product is not self-explanatory.
An honest comparison of your own variants — see comparison chart images for why comparing against named competitors is a different and riskier thing.

Legibility is a compliance question too

Amazon's A+ Content guidelines explicitly reject images carrying text too small to read on a mobile device. The gallery has no equivalent published threshold, but the same physics apply: most of your traffic is on a phone, where a 2,000 px square renders a few centimetres wide.

The size numbers to work to are Amazon's own: the best zoom experience wants 1,600 px or more on the longest side, 1,000 px is the floor below which zoom does not engage, 500 px is the minimum to appear on site at all, and 10,000 px is the ceiling. A 2,000 × 2,000 px square is the sane working size. Keep headline text large, high-contrast and away from the edges, because the mobile carousel crops tighter than the desktop preview suggests. More on that in our mobile readability post.

A+ Content is a stricter rulebook, not the same one

If you are brand-registered, do not assume gallery-legal text is A+ legal. A+ guidelines additionally rule out pricing and promotional language, references to off-Amazon customer service or returns policies, boastful satisfaction claims, time-sensitive words, competitor references, and reusing your gallery images verbatim. Amazon also began replacing seller-written image alt text with automatically generated descriptions, Europe first — so the alt-text field is no longer a place to put anything. Our A+ Content guide goes through the modules.

Before you upload

Main image: no added text of any kind. Photograph-only.
Every gallery slide: no price, no delivery promise, no URL or phone number, no date.
No stars, no review quotes, no ranking or badge claims, no Amazon branding.
Every claim either checkable or deleted. Certificates you can produce, numbers you can defend.
Every number on an image matches the bullets and the attribute fields exactly.
Read each slide at thumbnail size on a phone. If you cannot, neither can your buyer.

Graflio composites your real product photo and keeps every headline as an editable text layer, which makes the fifth point survivable — when a spec changes you fix the text, not the render. What no tool can do is judge your claims for you. That last read-through is yours.