Every A+ content project I have been part of got approved the same way. Somebody opened the desktop preview in Content Manager, on a laptop or a 27-inch monitor, at full width. Three or four people looked at it. Somebody said the icon bar should be a different colour. It got signed off.
There is a mobile preview in that same interface. In four years I have watched a lot of people click it once, glance at it, and go back to the desktop view — because the desktop view is where the thing looks like the thing they briefed.
Meanwhile the majority of the traffic reading that page is on a phone, most of it inside the Amazon app, and the app does not render your A+ the way Content Manager's preview suggests it will. Modules collapse. Columns stack. Text that fit a box at 970 pixels wide gets a viewport a third of that. The comparison chart — the module with the most conversion impact in the entire stack — turns into a sideways scroll that most shoppers never touch.
None of that shows up as an error. Nothing gets rejected. No dashboard turns red. The A+ is live, it's approved, it looks great on the screen where it was approved, and it is quietly failing on the screen where it's read.
This post is about what actually breaks, module by module, and what to do about it. Most of the fixes cost nothing and require no designer.
The Position Change Almost Nobody Knows About
Start with the thing that has the biggest strategic consequence and the least coverage.
On desktop, A+ content sits well down the page. The shopper works through images, price, buy box, bullet points, and then arrives at "From the manufacturer" as a lower section. That sequence is the one every A+ brief in the industry is implicitly written against: they've read the bullets, they know the basics, now we resolve the remaining doubt.
On the mobile app, the vertical order is different. A+ frequently lands much earlier in the scroll — in a lot of listings, ahead of the bullet points rather than after them.
I want to be careful here, because Amazon adjusts detail page ordering by category, by device, and by whatever experiment a shopper happens to be in, and it does it without announcing anything. Do not take my word for the order on your listing. Open your own top revenue ASIN in the Amazon app right now and scroll it. That takes ninety seconds and it is the single most useful thing in this post.
If your A+ does land ahead of the bullets on mobile, the consequence is real: for a large share of your traffic, your A+ is not the closing argument. It is the first structured argument the shopper meets, doing the job you assigned to the bullets, written on the assumption that the bullets had already happened.
That's why a lot of A+ opens with a brand banner and a headline like "Premium Materials, Trusted by Thousands." On desktop that's a soft transition after the specifics. On mobile it may be the first sentence about the product a stranger reads, and it says nothing.
What Breaks: The Module-By-Module List
Multi-column modules collapse, and the reading order changes
Standard A+ modules that lay out horizontally on desktop — the four-image quadrant, the three-image-and-text row, side-by-side image and text — do not stay horizontal on a phone. They reflow into a single column.
Two things happen when they do.
First, relative weight disappears. On desktop, a four-across quadrant reads as one unit: four small, equal, glanceable benefits. On mobile it becomes four stacked panels, each occupying a meaningful fraction of a screen. Your fourth-best benefit — the one that only exists because there were four slots in the grid — now gets roughly the same real estate as your first. You didn't decide that. The layout engine did.
Second, the sequence becomes literal. Desktop lets the eye jump around a grid. A vertical stack has one order and the shopper reads it or abandons it. Any module where the argument depended on seeing the panels together stops making that argument at all.
This is worth going to look at on your own listing, because the order things stack in is not always the order you'd guess from the desktop layout.
Text written to fill a box gets truncated or buried
A lot of A+ body copy exists at its current length because a designer sized a text block to balance an image, and a writer filled it. That's a desktop decision with a mobile cost: in a compressed viewport the block runs long, the useful clause ends up below the visible area, and callouts clip.
The fix is not "write for mobile." The fix is to stop writing inside the layout. Write your claims in a plain document — one line per claim — before the modules exist, then pick modules that fit the claims. Copy written in a box gets written to fit the box. Copy written first gets written to answer the question.
Baked-in image text is the most expensive habit in A+
This is the one I argue about most, and mobile is where the argument gets settled.
A standard A+ module image is built on roughly a 970-pixel-wide canvas. On a phone that canvas is rendered into a viewport a fraction of that width. Any type set at a size that felt reasonable on the design canvas shrinks by that same ratio. It doesn't get harder to read — for a lot of shoppers it stops being read.
There is a second cost that has nothing to do with legibility. Text baked into an image is not text as far as any non-human reader is concerned. Google indexes your detail page. The AI layer that assembles consideration sets reads your page as context. A screen reader reads it to a shopper who can't see the image. All three get nothing from a claim that only exists as pixels.
Every standard A+ module has real text fields — headline and body — that render as actual text, resize with the viewport, and are readable by everything. The claim goes in the text field. The image carries the demonstration, not the sentence.
If you only change one thing after reading this, change that.
The comparison chart is your best module and your worst mobile experience
The comparison chart is, in my experience, the highest conversion-impact module available in standard A+. It's also the one that degrades hardest on a phone, because a multi-column table has nowhere to go in a narrow viewport. It compresses, or it becomes a horizontal scroll, and most mobile shoppers do not scroll a table sideways. They see the first column and a half and move on.
So the module carrying your strongest argument is the one most likely to be functionally invisible to the majority of your traffic.
Three things help, none of which require rebuilding anything:
- Cut columns. A chart comparing you against six alternatives is a desktop artefact. You against two or three is legible in a narrow column and makes the same point. A chart is an argument, not an audit.
- Put your column first. If the shopper only ever sees the leftmost column and part of the next, make sure the leftmost one is yours.
- Shorten row labels. "Dishwasher safe" survives a narrow column. "Dishwasher safe on the top rack only" wraps to three lines and turns your table into a wall.
And write the row labels as buyer questions rather than spec names. "Will it fit a 32oz slot" does the interpreting for the shopper. "Capacity" makes them do it themselves, which on a phone means they don't.
Images crop, and they crop unpredictably
Assets built to a desktop aspect ratio get cropped to fit the app's rendering. Product details near an edge, a logo in a corner, a dimension callout tucked into the bottom right — all of it is at risk of being outside the frame a phone shows.
The practical rule is the same one that governs a hero image: keep anything load-bearing away from the edges, and check the actual render rather than the source file.
The Premium A+ Field Almost Nobody Fills Properly
Here is the part that surprises people who have already paid for Premium A+.
On the widest Premium modules — full-width image, navigation carousel, hotspot — you upload two separate images: a desktop asset and a mobile asset, at different dimensions. Reporting on the current specs puts the desktop asset around 1464 × 600 and the mobile asset around 600 × 450. Smaller Premium modules skip the second upload and reuse the desktop file.
Confirm the exact current dimensions in your own Content Manager rather than off any blog, including this one. The specs move.
What doesn't move is the point: Amazon gives you a dedicated mobile asset slot on the modules that matter most, and most brands fill it by re-uploading the desktop file. A 1464 × 600 banner is roughly 2.4:1. A 600 × 450 mobile slot is 4:3. Putting the first into the second means a wide cinematic banner is being squeezed or cropped into a shape it was never composed for, and the composition that made it work — product left, headline right, breathing room across the middle — does not survive.
That single field is the strongest argument for Premium that nobody makes. Not the hotspots, not the video, not the carousel: the fact that you get to compose separately for the surface where most of your readers are. If you're paying for Premium and reusing desktop assets on mobile, you're paying for a capability you've switched off.
The Premium modules themselves genuinely do render better on a phone. Full-width headers go edge to edge rather than compressing into columns. Hotspots expand copy in place on tap instead of competing for horizontal space. Carousels swipe natively rather than becoming a scroll bar. Those are real advantages and they are the reason a technical, high-consideration product often justifies the upgrade on mobile grounds alone.
Front-Load, Because A Third Never Arrive
Mobile scroll depth on A+ is not something Amazon publishes, and I'm not going to hand you a precise figure and pretend it came from a study. The working number I use is around 62% average depth, which is consistent with what I've seen across accounts and with the practitioner consensus, and I treat it as directional rather than exact.
Directionally, it means something simple and expensive: roughly a third of the people who reach your A+ never see the back third of it.
Now look at the standard module order most brands ship. Brand story or a brand banner at the top. Feature grid. Lifestyle. Another feature grid. Comparison chart at position six. FAQ at seven.
The two modules that resolve the actual buying decision are sitting where a third of the audience never arrives, behind three modules of atmosphere that the shopper did not scroll into A+ to read.
If you fix nothing else, fix the order. It costs nothing, requires no new assets, no approval risk beyond the resubmission, and no rewriting. Comparison chart and objection-killer in the first three positions. Brand story last, where it functions as reinforcement for somebody already convinced rather than as a toll gate for somebody still deciding.
Alt Text: The Mobile-Invisible Field That Does Three Jobs
Every A+ image has an alt text field. It takes seconds per module. In most accounts I audit it is empty across the entire catalogue.
You cannot see it on desktop review, which is exactly why nobody fills it. It is the accessible description of an image that is otherwise completely invisible to any non-human reader: a screen reader, Google, and the AI layer deciding whether your product belongs in a consideration set.
There's a specific catalogue-level benefit too. If you run a template chassis across a family of visually similar SKUs — which you should, at scale — alt text is the cheapest way to make those near-identical modules semantically distinct from each other. Same layout, same look, different described content per SKU.
Whether A+ text feeds Amazon's own search index is genuinely contested and nobody outside Amazon can settle it. Be suspicious of anyone quoting you a percentage on it. The posture above is correct under either answer, which is the whole reason to adopt it.
The 20-Minute Mobile A+ Audit
Do this on your top three revenue ASINs. On a real phone. In the Amazon app.
- Use the app, not a resized browser window and not the Content Manager preview. The app is where most of your traffic is and it renders differently from both.
- Scroll the whole page once at normal speed and note where A+ appears relative to the bullet points and the buy box. That tells you what job your A+ is actually doing on mobile.
- Read only the module headlines, top to bottom. If the headlines alone don't make the case, your A+ is working for the minority who read body copy.
- Find every claim that exists only inside an image. Each one is a claim you are making to sighted desktop users and nobody else. Move it into a text field.
- Tap into the comparison chart. How many columns are visible without scrolling sideways? Is yours one of them?
- Check where multi-column modules stacked, and in what order. Ask whether the resulting sequence still argues for anything.
- If you're on Premium, open the module and check whether a real mobile asset was uploaded or whether somebody dropped the desktop file into both slots.
Seven checks. Six of them produce fixes you can make from files and text fields you already own.
What To Change, Cheapest First
In the order I'd actually do it:
- Reorder the modules. Free, fast, biggest effect.
- Move claims out of images into headline and body fields. Costs a resubmission, no new assets.
- Cut comparison chart columns and shorten row labels. Text-field work.
- Fill alt text on every module. Ten minutes a listing.
- Replace the worst multi-column module with a single-column full-width alternative. Requires a new asset, but usually one.
- Upload genuine mobile assets on Premium modules. Requires composing for 4:3 rather than cropping a banner.
Nothing on that list is a rebuild. In most accounts, items one through four move the page more than a full redesign would, because a full redesign done in the same desktop review room reproduces every one of these problems in a nicer typeface.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does A+ content show up on the mobile app at all? Yes, and for a lot of listings earlier in the scroll than it appears on desktop. That's the reason to check yours rather than assume the desktop sequence holds.
Why does my A+ look different in the app versus mobile browser? Because they're different rendering paths. The app is generally the more native experience and the one carrying most of your traffic. Check the app first; check mobile web second.
Should I build a separate A+ for mobile? No — you can't, on standard modules, and you shouldn't want to. Standard A+ is one submission that reflows. The only place you genuinely compose separately is the mobile image slot on the widest Premium modules. Everywhere else the answer is to build content that survives reflow, which mostly means fewer columns and real text.
Do I need Premium A+ to fix mobile problems? No. The majority of what I find in a mobile audit is module order, image-baked copy and an unreadable comparison chart, all fixable on standard modules for free. Premium is worth it when your product is technical enough that hotspots and carousels genuinely help, or when you'll actually use the separate mobile assets.
How many modules should I run given mobile scroll depth? Five to seven, front-loaded, is a reasonable working range for most catalogues. The number matters far less than the order. Seven modules with the comparison chart at position two beats five with it at the end.
Does any of this affect ranking? Not through Amazon's search index in the way people usually mean, and anyone selling you a number on that is guessing. It affects conversion, which is a ranking input, and it affects how legible you are to Google and to the AI layer — both of which read text and neither of which reads a JPEG.
The pattern behind all of it is the same one that governs hero images: the asset is approved at a size and on a device that no shopper is using. With images the fix is to look at your own thumbnail in a real search grid. With A+ the fix is to open your own page in the app and read it the way a stranger with a thumb and a half-formed doubt would.
Twenty minutes, once per major SKU. Then go fix the module order first.
If you want the rest of the system, start with the image stack versus A+ content division of labor, then A+ content copywriting for the words themselves, and A+ content at catalog scale if you're running this across more than twenty SKUs.