Amazon Premium A+ Content: what it is and what it actually requires

Standard A+ Content is available to any brand-registered seller and covers the basics: image-and-text blocks, a simple comparison chart, a handful of layout templates. Premium A+ sits above that. It unlocks interactive modules — video, image hotspots, carousels, an expandable Q&A widget — and raises the ceiling on how much you can put on a single listing, up to seven modules deep.

Access is not automatic. Premium A+ is tied to Brand Registry and account standing, and has historically rolled out through invitation and eligibility criteria rather than being open to everyone by default. Whether or not you currently have access, you build and manage it the same way — through A+ Content Manager, under the Advertising tab in Seller or Vendor Central.

Premium A+ is a library of purpose-built blocks rather than one flexible canvas. A Full Image module is built for a clean hero shot or a lifestyle photo. Three separate Comparison Table variants exist to put your product's spec sheet next to a competitor's, or next to your own product line, so a shopper can see the difference instead of reading about it. Hotspots let you drop labelled callouts onto a single image — useful for a product with a lot of small features that would otherwise need a paragraph each to explain.

Video gets two dedicated modules — a standalone Full Video block and a Video with Text block that pairs the clip with a headline and description — plus a Video Image Carousel for stringing together several short clips. There is also a Q&A module for pre-empting the questions that would otherwise show up in your reviews, and a Technical Specifications module built to look like a spec sheet rather than a paragraph of prose.

Every image across every module follows the same base rules: JPG, PNG or BMP only, no animated GIFs, a 2MB ceiling per file, a minimum resolution of 72 dpi, and RGB colour only — CMYK files get rejected outright. Fall under a module's minimum pixel dimensions and Amazon will not stretch the image to fit; it simply will not accept it. Oversized files get resized down automatically, but only down to the module's stated minimum, never below it.

Video has its own limits: MP4 only, 200MB maximum file size, and a 180-second hard cap. A Full Video module needs a minimum resolution of 960×540 and a preview image of at least 1464×600px; the Video with Text module works off a smaller 800×600 canvas. Character counts vary sharply by module too — a Full Image module gives you an 80-character headline and 300 characters of body text, while a Comparison Table headline is capped at just 25 characters. Write past the limit and the field simply will not take the extra text, so it is worth drafting copy against the real limit rather than trimming it afterwards.

The specs feel bureaucratic until you look at what they protect. Amazon's own guidance for brands notes that shoppers form a first impression of a product within roughly ninety seconds, and that most of that impression comes down to colour and visual clarity rather than the words on the page. That is the whole argument for getting pixel dimensions and file quality right — a slightly soft, cropped, or oddly-sized hero image undercuts everything else on the listing before a customer reads a single bullet.

Video carries the clearest evidence. Amazon's own module guide reports sales increases of close to ten percent from adding video to Premium A+ content, that the large majority of surveyed shoppers said video mattered to their research, and that customers who watch a product video convert at more than three times the rate of those who do not. None of that needs a long video — Amazon's own recommendation is to keep clips to around ten seconds, since that is roughly where average viewer attention drops off, well short of the 180-second technical maximum.

The most common failure is not a missing spec, it is a mismatch: a good desktop hero image with no separate mobile asset uploaded, so the module falls back to a cropped, badly-framed version of the desktop file on phones — where most Amazon traffic actually happens. The second is treating Premium A+ like a place to dump more product photos, when the modules are built for specific jobs: hotspots for feature density, comparison tables for competitive context, video for anything hard to explain in text.

The fix for both is planning the module sequence before opening A+ Content Manager, not while inside it — deciding what each module needs to prove, sourcing separate mobile-ready assets from the start, and writing copy to the character limit rather than around it.

If you are setting up or rebuilding Premium A+ Content for a launch, that is exactly the kind of build we do at ARTH — modules planned first, assets shot to spec, and copy written to the character count instead of trimmed after the fact.