Selling on amazon.de: the German listing checklist

Getting onto amazon.de

Germany is one of the stores in Amazon's Europe account, and a listing there does not appear in the others by itself.

A seller already on amazon.com with a Professional account creates a regional Europe account; a seller new to Amazon creates a North America and Brazil unified account first and adds Europe from the Sell Globally dashboard. Build International Listings can cross-list existing products into each Europe store, and Amazon's own expansion page adds the detail that catches people: Listing in one Europe store does not automatically cross-list products in others. A German listing is a German listing. The French one is separate work.

Selling into Germany from elsewhere in Europe is the same picture from the other side, and expanding from the US to Europe covers the account side in full. The rest of this page is the listing.

The title: one long noun, capitalised

German puts the search term in a compound noun, and the compound is what shoppers type.

• Build the compound"Digital kitchen scale" becomes "Digitale Küchenwaage": the describing word moves in front and the two nouns fuse into one. The amazon.de search box suggests "küchenwaage digital" and "digitale küchenwaage" for the prefix küchenwaage, and it suggests "waage küche" too, but the compound is the word on the product.
• Capitalise every nounCapitalisation in German is grammar, not style. Küchenwaage, Edelstahl, Display: every noun takes a capital, and a title in English sentence case reads as an import on sight.
• Decimal commasGerman writes 1,5 l and 0,1 g. A title or bullet carrying 1.5 l is understood and looks translated, which is the impression a German listing has to avoid.
• 75 characters, written for GermanGerman compounds are long, so a title translated from an English one that already used its whole budget will not fit. Write the German title to the limit rather than shortening a translation. The 75 character limit covers what Amazon does with a title over it.

Umlauts, ß and the byte budget

Four characters, each costing two bytes, in a field Amazon measures in bytes.

Counted at build time with the same encoder Amazon stores with, not by hand.

Each ä, ö, ü and ß, and their capitals, costs two bytes in UTF-8. One umlaut makes no difference. A search terms field full of German compounds has a dozen or more, and that is the margin between a field that is indexed and one that is not, because Amazon ignores an over-budget search terms field as a whole rather than cutting it.

Write the umlauts properly. "Kuechenwaage" is how German is typed on a keyboard that has no ü, and the amazon.de search box answers the prefix "kuechenwaage" with "küchenwaage". Amazon does not document whether its ranking treats the two spellings as one, so spend the bytes on words you do not have yet rather than on transliterated copies of words you do. Paste the field into the free listing checker and it counts the bytes as you type. Search terms are measured in bytes explains the rule itself.

English words that mean something else in German

German has borrowed English words and changed what they mean. A translator who goes back to the dictionary word lands on the term nobody searches.

Read from the amazon.de search box's suggestions on 28 October 2026.

Duden, the reference dictionary of German, defines a Handy as a small mobile phone and a Beamer as a device for projecting digital images onto a screen. Neither word means that in English, which is exactly why a translation engine working from English, or a translator being careful, writes Mobiltelefon and Projektor instead. Both are correct German, and the search box shows what they cost: "mobiltelefon hülle" brought back two suggestions to "handyhülle"'s ten, and "projektor" led to star projectors for children's bedrooms.

Bullets and description: Sie or du, and one of them only

German forces a choice English never asks you to make.

German has a formal "you" (Sie) and an informal one (du). Copy that addresses the shopper has to pick one and keep it, across the bullets, the description and every product in the range. A listing that says Sie in one bullet and du in the next reads as stitched together from two sources.

• Lead each bullet with the attributeOpen each bullet with the attribute it covers: Material, Fassungsvermögen (capacity), Lieferumfang (what is in the box). A bullet that opens with an adjective delays the noun the reader is looking for.
• Metric units, written the German way5 kg, 1,5 l, 30 x 20 cm. Imperial measurements belong in the amazon.com listing, not this one.
• Within 255 characters eachGerman runs longer than English for the same content, so a translated bullet that fitted in English can overflow. The free checker and Utlista both measure each bullet against 255 characters.

Two legal items that touch the listing

Much of the law on selling in Germany concerns the product, its label and the seller's account. These two reach the offer itself.

The unit price (Grundpreis) is per kilogram, litre, cubic metre, metre or square metre under § 5, and § 4(3) lists exceptions, among them goods with a nominal weight or volume under 10 grams or 10 millilitres. A price per unit needs a quantity to divide by, so the practical point for a listing is that the net quantity has to be in it and has to be right: 500 ml in the title and 750 ml in the quantity data produces a unit price for a bottle you do not sell.

The second is GPSR, Regulation (EU) 2023/988. Its Article 19 requires an online offer to show the warnings and safety information that belong with the product, and Article 9(7) requires safety information in a language consumers of the Member State easily understand, as that Member State determines. For amazon.de, that is a question about German. GPSR and the language of safety information quotes both articles in full.

The amazon.de listing checklist

Everything above, in the order you would check it before an upload.

• TitleBrand, then the compound noun shoppers type, then capacity and material. Every noun capitalised. Decimal commas. At most 75 characters.
• Bullets and descriptionSie or du, consistently. The attribute first. Metric units written the German way. German words over dictionary words: Handy, Beamer.
• Search termsWords the title does not already carry, separated by spaces. Real umlauts. Counted in bytes, with 249 as the ceiling.
• Quantity and safetyA net quantity that agrees everywhere it appears, for the unit price. Warnings and safety information in German where your product carries them.

How Utlista writes for amazon.de

Briefly, because the checklist works without us.

Utlista writes the German title, bullets, description and search terms from the listing you already have, using the phrases the amazon.de search box suggests rather than a word for word translation: compounds built, nouns capitalised, umlauts written. Search terms are measured in bytes and the title in characters before anything can enter the upload file. It does not write safety text or the unit price, and it never writes to your account: you download one file for Germany and upload it yourself.

Where this comes from

So you can check it rather than take our word for it.

The account steps and the quoted line on cross-listing are from Amazon's "Expand to Europe" page on sell.amazon.com, read on 2026-10-28. The Preisangabenverordnung is quoted from § 4 and § 5 as published on gesetze-im-internet.de, read the same day; the English is our translation. GPSR is quoted, with its source, on its own page. The meanings of Handy and Beamer are Duden's.

The search suggestions were read from the amazon.de search box's completion service on 2026-10-28. Every byte and character count is computed by the page from the text beside it. The example title is from our amazon.de page and the search terms draft was written for this one; neither is generated output.

Short answers

The questions sellers search for about German listings, answered from the same sources.

Do umlauts count as two characters in Amazon search terms?

They count as one character and two bytes. Amazon budgets backend search terms in bytes, and in UTF-8 each ä, ö, ü and ß costs two. A German search terms field of 249 characters can therefore be over a 249 byte budget, and an over-budget field is ignored as a whole rather than cut.

Should I write ue instead of ü in an Amazon Germany listing?

No. Write the umlaut. German shoppers read "ue" as a workaround from a keyboard without umlauts, and the amazon.de search box suggests the umlaut spelling even when a shopper types "kuechenwaage".

Do Amazon Germany listings need a unit price?

German law does, for goods offered by weight, volume, length or area. § 4 of the Preisangabenverordnung requires the price per unit (Grundpreis) next to the total price, per kilogram, litre, cubic metre, metre or square metre under § 5, with exceptions such as goods under 10 grams or 10 millilitres. It is not legal advice; check how it applies to your products.

Does my Amazon Germany listing need GPSR safety information in German?

Regulation (EU) 2023/988 requires an online offer to show the warnings and safety information that belong with the product, and requires that safety information to be in a language consumers of the Member State can easily understand, as that Member State determines. For amazon.de that is a German-language question.