50 Negative Keywords Every Amazon India Seller Should Add Today

Negative keywords are the single cheapest win in Amazon PPC — they cost nothing to add and immediately stop ad budget from being wasted on queries that will never convert. Yet fewer than 25% of Indian Amazon sellers have more than 20 negative keywords in their accounts. This guide gives you 50 universal negatives to add today across every campaign, plus category-specific negatives for apparel, electronics, beauty and home, plus Indian-market-specific waste terms you will not see on global guides.

1. Why Negative Keywords Matter More on Amazon India

Amazon India sits at the intersection of Hindi, English and regional-language shopping queries. Customers search in transliterated Hindi (“kapda” for cloth), in Hinglish (“best wala phone”), and in full English. They also search with intent modifiers that signal they will never buy from you: “review,” “tutorial,” “unboxing,” “free” — the classic browsers, not buyers.

Without negative keywords, your broad-match and phrase-match campaigns will show on every one of these queries. Indian sellers running broad match without negative keyword discipline typically waste 15-30% of their ad budget — ₹15,000-₹30,000 per lakh spent. Adding the 50 negatives below stops most of that bleed in under an hour.

2. 20 Universal Negatives — Add to Every Campaign

These apply regardless of category. Add as negative phrase match at the campaign level:

3. 10 Indian-Market-Specific Negatives

These catch specifically-Indian query patterns that waste ad budget:

The “first copy” / “1st copy” queries are unique to Indian e-commerce and often indicate shoppers looking for knock-offs. If you sell authentic products, these clicks never convert. “Distributor” and “wholesale” signal B2B queries that retail-priced Amazon listings cannot serve.

4. Category-Specific Negatives

Apparel & Fashion (5 terms)

Customers searching “shirt image” or “kurti drawing” are researching, not buying.

Electronics & Accessories (5 terms)

“EMI” queries often indicate price-shopping across platforms; conversion rates on these are 40-60% lower than non-EMI clicks.

Beauty & Personal Care (5 terms)

“Homemade face pack” and similar queries are info-seekers, not buyers.

Home & Kitchen (5 terms)

“Kitchen decor ideas” and “room design” are browsing queries.

5. Campaign-Level vs Ad-Group-Level Negatives

Amazon lets you add negatives at two levels:

• Campaign level — applies to every ad group in that campaign. Use this for universal negatives like “free,” “review,” “tutorial” that apply regardless of which SKU is being advertised.
• Ad group level — applies only to that ad group. Use this for product-specific negatives — e.g., in a “red kurti” ad group, add “blue” and “green” as negative phrase so the ad does not show on mismatched color queries.

A common mistake: adding everything at the campaign level. This blocks potentially relevant terms across all your SKUs. Default to ad-group level for anything product-specific, and reserve campaign level for universal waste terms.

6. Negative Phrase vs Negative Exact

Amazon offers two match types for negatives:

• Negative phrase — blocks any search term containing those words in order. “cheap” as negative phrase blocks “cheap yoga mat,” “cheap mat for yoga,” and “yoga mat cheap price.”
• Negative exact — blocks only that exact search string. “cheap yoga mat” as negative exact blocks only the precise query, nothing else.

Rule of thumb: use negative phrase for universal wastes (free, review, tutorial) and for broad concepts you never want to rank on. Use negative exact surgically for specific queries you have seen in the search term report that burn budget with zero conversions.

7. Harvesting Negatives from the Search Term Report

The 50 universal negatives above are your one-time setup. The ongoing work is harvesting negatives from your actual search term report — queries that your ads have already shown on and failed to convert. Every week, pull the report, filter to queries with 10+ clicks and zero orders, and add them as negative exact at the ad group level.

Full walkthrough: How to Read Your Amazon Search Term Report.

8. Automating This with eVanik

For a seller with 5-10 campaigns, manual negative harvesting works fine at a weekly cadence. For 50+ campaigns, it breaks. eVanik's Amazon PPC platform ingests search term reports from the Amazon Ads API every 24 hours, applies your custom negation rules (e.g., “negate any term with 15+ clicks, zero orders, 14-day window”), and either auto-executes or queues for your approval. Most customers eliminate 40-60 hours/month of PPC operations.