Run through this before publishing a new listing, or as a diagnostic pass on an underperforming existing one. This checklist pulls together the individual principles covered elsewhere in this pillar into a single pass you can run in about fifteen minutes per listing — treat it as the last gate before anything goes live, and as the first thing to run when a previously fine listing starts underperforming for no obvious reason.
How to use this checklist
Work through it top to bottom rather than jumping to whichever item seems most likely to be the problem — a genuinely underperforming listing often has more than one weak area, and fixing only the first issue you notice can leave real conversion left on the table. For a brand-new listing, treat every item as a pre-publish gate; for an existing listing, treat any unchecked item as a candidate fix, roughly in the order listed, since title and image issues tend to have the largest effect on whether a buyer even opens the listing.
When to re-run this
- Before publishing any new listing, without exception.
- When an existing listing's conversion rate or click-through drops with no obvious external cause (a price change, a new competitor, a policy update).
- Periodically (quarterly is a reasonable cadence) on your highest-revenue listings, since marketplace requirements and competitor listings both drift over time even when nothing about your own listing changed.
- After any bulk update, on a sample of the listings affected, to confirm the update didn't silently break something (see Common Catalog Errors).
What this checklist doesn't replace
This is a listing-content QA pass, not a full account-health or advertising audit. A listing can pass every item here and still underperform because of a pricing, inventory, or Buy Box issue outside the listing content itself — if a listing checks out completely against this list and still isn't converting, look at price competitiveness and account-health signals next rather than continuing to tweak content.