Best Practices for Listing on Amazon – The Purge and Replace Option

Understanding Purge and Replace
When you upload a product feed you can use the ‘Purge and Replace’ flag to replace your current inventory with the inventory in the feed. This means that all your listings which are not in the feed will be removed from Amazon. If you upload an empty feed with the ‘Purge and Replace’ option, you will delete all your listings from your Seller Account.

Avoid using the Purge and Replace Option
In general, it is not recommended to use the Purge and Replace option to manage your inventory.  You may currently be using it to perform the following tasks:

Disable out of stock offers
If you have a large inventory, you may feel tempted to upload regularly an inventory feed containing only the products in stock with the purge and replace option. This process to disable out of stock offers is not recommended, since it is error-prone and the processing time of a feed with the purge and replace option can take up to several hours. If you run out of stock on some items, please use the Price and Quantity update feed to set the stock levels to 0. This is a more efficient process which also saves you the additional effort of re-listing your products later.

Synchronize your Product Database with your Amazon Seller Account
You can use the purge and replace option to keep your products sold on Amazon synchronized with your own product database. However, this is not recommended. If you have an error in your feed or you upload the wrong feed, you may potentially erase your entire inventory on Amazon. This would entail a loss in sales until you have re-listed your products.

We recommend that you explicitly delete products from your Seller Account, and only if you know that you are never going to sell it again. If you are just temporarily out of stock, please do not delete the product but set the quantity to 0.

When to use the Purge and Replace option
There are some good cases in which you can use the purge and replace option.

Delete your entire Inventory to start from scratch
If for some reason you want to purge your entire inventory to start from scratch, you can upload an empty feed with just the headers using the purge and replace option. This will remove all your listings with the exception of those you created manually using the web interface. The latter have to be manually deleted.

Use different SKUs to reference your products
If you decide to change your SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) naming convention to reference your products, you can use the purge and replace option UNLESS

1. There is overlap between your old and new set of SKUs, where any new SKU references a different product than the old one.
2. You are using the ‘Fulfillment by Amazon’ (FBA) program. It is not possible to use a different SKU for a product fulfilled by Amazon. If you are in this case, you can create new SKUs for all your products not fulfilled by Amazon and then delete all old SKUs.

Alex.

Comments

[Stephen Whitaker]

Am I right in thinking that Clive aka Alexthefatdawg uploads in bulk and yet there never seems to be a problem with any of his listings (apart from a tendency to pennydom), if he can do it why can't others with smaller inventories?

[D.]

The obvious answer to the problem of bulk uploads corrupting the catalogue is to stop bulk uploads from creating any catalogue entries (i.e. allow it to create, update or delete offers only) until a bulk uploader which can create bulk uploads accurately is designed, written, tested and implemented. This would allow the vast majority of conscientious sellers to go about the business of correcting the damage already done. Granted, the megalisters would have to employ somone to create new catalogue entries manually, but at least the entries would be more accurate and - perhaps - might even include a cover image.

Once the condition of the catalogue improves the work necessary to improve the search tools will become clearer. Potential buyers will begin to regain confidence and have fewer doubts about spending their money via Amazon.

What Amazon appears to forget is that the catalogue is the jewel in their crown - they neglect it at their peril.

[Stephen Whitaker]

Here's the reply I got from a seller whose bulk upload had created a redundant duplicate listing...
Dear Stephen,
I am aware that this appears to inflate the number of Amazon listings, however the problem in this instance appears to be that Amazon feels that Hodges, C.W. (which is the format we use) is a different author from C. Walter Hodges, and thus assigns an ASIN number. It also defaults the book grade to "acceptable", which I personally find more annoying, since it makes a mockery of assessing the grade of book, be it a fine copy in dust wrapper or a scruffy ex-library working copy, they are all lumped together as "acceptable". Nevertheless, thank you for drawing my attention to this, since obviously anyone searching by ISBN will not see our copy as being listed for sale, and we therefore would miss out on a possible sale.

[Jane Turner (Innoworking Associates)]

The chaos that is the catalogue would be acceptable if Amazon's search engine was capable of finding a needle in a haystack. It was wasn't great before the latest "improvement" but now you'll struggle to locate the farmyard, let alone the haystack or the needle within.

[Isabel]

Agreed. It's very tiring having to keep reporting these to Amazon when they could so easily deal with it with one swift movement. It seems, however, that they are in thrall to the big and powerful warehouse sellers.

[Carol's Books]

I completely agree with Post Mortem Books regarding the state of the catalogue. How can we expect buyers to plough through many many catalogue entries for the same title/publisher/date combination? This needs sorting urgently, although a solution has been dragging on for years

[Sheila Wagonwheel]

Can you make the >> larger it is confusing the users looking to read the comments!

[BarkerBooks]

The title of this is 'Best Practices for Listing on Amazon' - oh if only !
I am in full agreement with the OP re.the multiple entries for EXACTLY the same book - with titles corrupted by the addition of rogue 'S, or the author's name being reversed or initials instead of full name - nothing wrong in that in itself, but does NOT need a separate catalogue entry for each minor difference.
Also, why even have the option for 'Unknown' for binding - this option should be totally removed - even if uploading in bulk, the lister should know what binding a book has.
There should, though be the option for 'unknown' for date, so we don't end up with dozens of books (supposedly) printed in 1111, or 9999 etc.
PLEASE Amazon, address some of these major problems before making useless osmetic tweaks to the site.

[Post Mortem Books]

As my original query and comment has, for some inexplicable reason, disappeared I'll repost what I said:

The Amazon catalogue is in a desperate state, fouled by endless duplicate listings by certain Marketplace sellers who continue to upload their stock in such a way as to create pages and pages of the same title. Prospective customers, searching for a title, are often faced with 40+ listings of the same title (Hardcover, Paperback, No Binding, Binding Unknown and every variant of date, 1000, 1111 etc etc) that these particular sellers can create to ensure only their books are seen.
Amazon know that this happens but nothing is ever done to stop it. Why? Threaten to remove these sellers - or in fact just remove them - and the problem will stop.

Is this blog going to be pro-active or is it just a flag-waving exercise for Amazon?

[Stephen Whitaker]

When asked why they have created these mangled duplicate listings the perpetrators always blame Amazon's handling of their bulk upload.

EG B001PBA34G