How to read one of our Amazon listings

A clothing listing on Amazon is built from several sources. We write the title and the bullets, the platform fills in structured fields, and the chart image is uploaded separately. These parts have very different reliability, and it helps to know which is which before you decide anything.

The title

Written for search, not for you. A title packed with eleven comma-separated phrases is aimed at every query we could think of, because that is how anyone gets found on Amazon. Read it for the noun in the middle and ignore the rest.

The bullets

Marketing copy with occasional facts embedded. Worth skimming for a mention of pockets, lining or a specific length, all of which are hard to see in a photo. Not worth reading for anything with an adjective in it.

The structured fields

Fabric type, care instructions, closure, country of origin. These come from a form rather than from a copywriter, so they are terse and occasionally blank, but they are not embellished. This is the part that appears on our pages here verbatim.

The size chart

Usually an image among the product photos, sometimes a link under the size selector. It is the single most useful thing on the page and the easiest to miss, because it looks like another lifestyle shot in the thumbnail strip. Typing it out is most of the reason this site exists.

The rating and count

The count matters more than the score. A 4.6 from 40 ratings tells you much less than a 4.3 from 9,000, and clothing scores cluster in a narrow band anyway. Where a rating exists we print both numbers on the page, low ones included.

One quirk to know about colours

A single listing often covers a dozen colours under one entry, and the rating, the review count and the chart are shared across all of them. So a review complaining about a print you are not buying still counts toward the score you are reading. We split colours onto separate pages here for browsing, and we keep flagging that the numbers underneath are shared.