One product, three marketplaces: why UK makers should stop copying listings

If you make things in a UK workshop and sell them online, there is a good chance you sell the same product in more than one place. A candle on Etsy, the same candle on eBay, perhaps the same candle again on Amazon Handmade. It makes sense. Each marketplace brings its own buyers, and spreading across them means a quiet month on one does not sink the business.

What usually happens next also makes sense, at least at first. You write one good listing, polish it, and paste it everywhere. Same title, same description, same keywords. It saves an afternoon. It is also, I would argue, one of the most common reasons a product does well on one marketplace and goes nowhere on the others.

The marketplaces do not agree on length

The simplest problem is the title. Each marketplace sets its own limit, and the gaps between them are large.

As of September 2026, Etsy allows titles of up to 140 characters (Etsy Help). Amazon caps product titles at 75 characters (Amazon Seller Central, as of September 2026), and its title best-practice page for Handmade goes further, recommending 60 characters or fewer. When we last checked eBay's developer documentation, in June 2026, eBay titles allowed up to 80 characters.

So a title written to fill Etsy's space is too long for both of the others. Paste it into eBay and it has to be cut. Paste it into Amazon Handmade and a large part of it goes. Whatever words happened to sit at the end are the ones that disappear, and nobody decided which words those should be.

The reverse is not automatically safe either. Etsy's own updated guidance, as of September 2026, recommends shorter, natural titles and suggests sellers "consider using less than 15 words" (Etsy Seller Handbook). That is a different instruction from Amazon's character cap, and a title shaped to satisfy one is not automatically right for the other.

The fields are different, not just the lengths

Length is the visible part. The less visible part is that each marketplace asks for different information in different boxes.

Keeping track of all this is a chore, partly because marketplaces revise their guidance and a limit you learned when you opened your shop may not be the one in force today. Sellura keeps a dated, per-marketplace list of listing character limits, with every figure tied to the marketplace's own documentation, because a limit is only useful if you know when it was last true.

Here is how the three compare. As of September 2026, Etsy gives you up to 13 tags, each up to 20 characters (Etsy Help). eBay has no tags field at all. It uses item specifics instead: structured attributes such as material, colour or size. Amazon Handmade, as of September 2026, pairs the title with a separate Item Highlights field of up to 125 characters, and gives you backend search terms limited to 249 bytes (Amazon Seller Central).

Now think about what happens to a listing copied from Etsy. Its tags have nowhere to go on eBay. The information in them has to be rebuilt as item specifics, and item specifics ask a different question. Not "what might a buyer type?" but "what exactly is this thing, attribute by attribute?" On Amazon, meanwhile, the descriptive phrase that no longer fits in the title has a proper home in Item Highlights, but only if you put it there. A pasted listing leaves that field empty.

None of the marketplaces publishes the full recipe for how its search reads these fields, and I would be wary of anyone who claims to know it. What you can control is simpler: give each marketplace the fields it asks for, and fill them properly.

One wallet, three listings

Say you make leather wallets in a small workshop in Leeds. Here is how the same wallet might look in three places.

• Etsy. A natural title that describes the wallet the way a gift buyer would think of it, kept well short of the cap in line with Etsy's own advice. The other search phrases (personalised, slim, hand stitched, a gift for him) are spread across your tags, each phrase trimmed to fit the tag length.
• eBay. A tighter title that leads with what the item is. The details that lived in your Etsy tags move into item specifics: material, colour, style, whether it can be personalised. A gift phrase may have no obvious structured home here, and that is fine.
• Amazon Handmade. A title that fits the 75-character cap and ideally Amazon's own 60-character suggestion, which forces you to say what the wallet is in very few words. The supporting detail goes into Item Highlights. The remaining search phrases go into the backend search terms, a field measured in bytes rather than characters.

Same wallet, same photographs, same workshop. Three different listings, each shaped for the marketplace it sits on.

The honest trade-off

I will not pretend this is free. Separate listings cost time, and not only once. Every time you change a material, a size or a colour option, you now have three places to update instead of one. Mistakes creep in. One listing says tan, another says brown, and a buyer who notices starts to wonder what else is wrong.

For a small UK brand with one or two people doing everything, that cost is real, and it is fair to ask whether every product deserves it. My view is that it does not, at least not all at once. A few habits keep the work manageable.

• Start with the products that already sell. Your best performers are where a properly shaped listing has the most to gain. Slower lines can wait.
• Keep one master record of facts. Materials, dimensions, colours, care instructions. Write each marketplace's listing from that record, never from another marketplace's listing. The facts stay consistent while the shape changes.
• Respect the hard limits everywhere, even on a lightly adapted copy. If you only have time to adjust a listing a little, at least make sure the title fits and the right fields are filled.
• Date what you know. When you check a limit on a marketplace's help pages, note the month. If a number in your head has no date attached, check it again before you rely on it.

None of this needs special software or a big team. It needs the decision to stop treating three marketplaces as three copies of the same shop window.

Write for where the listing lives

Selling on more than one marketplace is a sensible way for UK makers to reach more buyers. But each marketplace is its own room, with its own rules about what goes where and how much of it fits. A listing written for one room and carried unchanged into the others will rarely sit comfortably anywhere except the first.

Write one listing per marketplace, from one set of facts. It takes longer. It is also the only way each listing gets a fair hearing.

Oleksandr Shaniuk is the founder of Sellura, a listing tool for sellers on online marketplaces such as Etsy, eBay and Amazon Handmade. Based in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oleksandr writes about how marketplace listing rules differ and why it matters for small sellers.