Fulfilment by Amazon - Introduction of low stock notification emails can help you ensure you do not miss any sales opportunity

With a view to helping our valued merchants optimize their sales via FBA, starting January 2010 Amazon will be sending regular Low Stock notification emails to its merchants highlighting the items which are either out of stock or could become out of stock based on their 7 day sales volume.  We would like to remind you that you can also manage your inventory and maintain visibility on ageing items and stock levels via the Inventory Age report introduced mid 2009. For more details, to view the report online or download in CSV format please go to your seller account 8.3 FBA Report Details >Inventory Age

Creating a product feed with your SellerCentral Inventory Report

The previous blog article „Using the Amazon SellerCentral Inventory report“ has shown you how you can create  and download an inventory report via SellerCentral which will give you quick access to your account’s product data along with product and price information.

With this article we will show you how to use your account’s inventory report in order to create a new product feed which can then be uploaded into your SellerCentral account. This might be helpful for those cases where you no longer have access to your original product feed. Using your SellerCentral’s Inventory Report in conjunction with the „ListingLoader“ template will allow you to re-create a standard product feed from scratch.

Before you continue, make sure that you create an inventory report and import it into Excel. Refer to the previous blog article in case you have questions. Once you’ve imported the file into Excel, make sure that you do not close the file. In the following steps, we will need to access this data and have it transferred to the ListingLoader template.

The next step includes downloading the ListingLoader template from SellerCentral help: Go to Manage Inventory -> Reference -> Text-file Templates -> ListingLoader, download the file and open it in Excel.

Just like all other product templates on Amazon SellerCentral, the ListingLoader template basically consists of multiple tabs in Excel, covering the template areas such as „data definitions“, „instructions“ etc. Before we continue with the next steps, we may need to activate the Excel macro settings in order to activate the ListingLoader functionality.

If Excel should show you a security warning which indicates that the template’s macros have been deactivated, you need to activate them by clicking on the Options button and selecting Enable this content. The ListingLoader template will only work when the macro settings are enabled.

Once the activation of the macros was successful, you will see an additional menu option in the template.

Now go to the „Listings-Template“tab.  We will now transfer price, quantity, SKU and ASIN from our inventory report over to the ListingLoader template.

This is our inventory file that we’ve imported from SellerCentral:

 
We will now transfer the information over to the ListingLoader template. The final result should look like this:

Now go to the template’s Add-Ins tab. Excel will now give you access to the ListingLoader’s special functions that we will use for the next steps.

For this blog article, we will use the „Bulk Lookup“function which will run a query on the Amazon database for all items that you’ve entered. If the item exists, the ListingLoader will automatically retrieve information such as the product title from the Amazon database and have it added to your product offer data.

Click on the „Bulk Lookup“button. The Listingloader now accesses the Amazon database which is indicated by a progress window.

Once finished, our ListingLoader template looks a little bit different:

Information such as the product condition as well as the product title have been retrieved from the Amazon database and have automatically been added to the ListingLoader template. The file is now ready for being transferred into your SellerCentral account.

Uploading your ListingLoader data can either be done directly in the template by clicking on the Upload File button. Alternatively, you can save your ListingLoader file as tab-delimited text file and upload the text file via SellerCentral.

In comparison to a regular product template, you will notice that the ListingLoader does only contain very few columns. Standard columns such as “product description” or “images” are missing. The reason behind that is that the ListingLoader’s main purpose is to provide an option for easily creating offer data for existing items on the Amazon platform. The offer data will then borrow the product description, images etc. from the existing product data. In case you still want to supply your own e.g. product description, you can transfer the ListingLoader’s content over to a regular product template and amend it accordingly.

Using the Amazon SellerCentral Inventory Report

Did you know that SellerCentral allows you to request an inventory report for your offers? Apart from the product’s SKU and ASIN, the inventory reports also contain your product’s current stock and price information, thus providing you with a quick offer overview. As the inventory reports are generated in the standard reporting format (tab-delimited text files), you can import the reports into Excel or process the reports for uploading the information into your data warehouse.

How to request an inventory report:

In SellerCentral, select the „Inventory“tab and then select option „Inventory Reports“. Request an inventory report. SellerCentral will process your request as a background process; creating  an inventory report can take up to one hour.

 

Once the report has been prepared for you, the file can be downloaded from SellerCentral. Save the file onto your hard drive and select „Text file“as file type.

 

Note: In case you participate  in the „Fulfillment By Amazon“ program, SellerCentral’s „Inventory Report“ also allows you to request an inventory report for those items that are fulfilled by Amazon.

Importing your Inventory Report into Excel:

Run Excel, then open the inventory report file that we’ve just saved. Excel will now start the import wizard for your file.

Please select “Delimited” as Original Data Type, then go to the next screen.

 

If not already selected, please check the „Tab“ delimiter option. The dialogue should now show you all four columns SKU, ASIN, price and quantity as separated information. Proceed to the next step.

Now you can set the format for each of the columns. We recommend choosing format option “Text” in order to retain leading zeros in your numeric information – otherwise Excel might just remove these leading zeros from your inventory report.

 

Confirm your selection and click the „Finish“button. Excel will now import your inventory report.

 

A follow-up article in this blog will show you how you can use the inventory report in combination with the ListingLoader template in order to create a product inventory report from scratch (e.g. in case you’ve lost the original file).

Avoid creation of item duplicates

To assure that your product offers will be surfaced to our buying customers, you need to make sure that they are listed on the correct product page. It’s our objective to present a single detail page for each product, where the customer can find all available information about that item. The customer can inform themselves about the product features and compare the competing offers without jumping between different pages. This principle supports the marketplace’s transparency and increases offer comparability.

In addition this single detail page allows us to track the popularity of an item and inform customers about this rank. Customer reviews and the popular shopping recommendations (“customers who bought A also were interested in B”) are based on the single detail page and suffer from duplicates.

Missing or wrong item information might lead to duplicate catalog entries. These duplicates lead to buyer confusion (“Is this the same item? Is there a difference not documented?”), and might result in the buyer turning away without purchasing the item at all. Furthermore duplicates weaken the sales rank statistics we provide to you and the quality of product recommendations for our and your customers. This affects the visibility of your offers in the search results.

For this reason we require the item’s barcode (EAN, ISBN, UPC) in the product upload, along with other attributes like title, release date, brand name or model number. Checking and comparing these allows us to either attach your offer to the right existing item, or create a new catalog entry for new items that we don’t know yet.

Only load items where you have access to the necessary item information. The quality of our catalog and the attractiveness of our marketplace would be impacted if you ignore this basic content requirement we have about your product data. We reserve the right to remove duplicate catalog entries, this can have an impact on your offer for such a product. If you notice a duplicate entry in our catalog, you may report this to our seller support, who will initiate the correction of the data.

Using your SellerCentral account’s Vacation Settings

SellerCentral offers you a vacation setting for your seller account that allows you to activate and deactivate your offer listings with just one mouse click. If you are, for example, out of the office for a few weeks and want to temporarily deactivate your offer listings on Amazon.co.uk because you can’t process incoming orders during this time, please follow these steps in order to deactivate your listings:

In SellerCentral, select the Settings tab and then select the Account Info menu item. You will find a paragraph called Listing Status.

Click the Edit button. The next dialoge will allow you to activate or deactivate your offer listings. In order to deactivate your offers, select the Inactive option and then confirm your selection by clicking the Update button.

Your SellerCentral account’s start page will notify you that your offer listings have been deactivated and will no longer be available to your customers on the Amazon.co.uk platform until you reactivate your listings. Please be advised that activating as well as deactivating your offer listings may take up to one hour before the changes are applied.

Note: Changing your listing status to "inactive" has no impact on current orders that might have been placed immediately before you deactivated your listings - it will only prevent customers from placing new orders for your items. Existing orders still need to be processed in order to avoid late shipments. We suggest that you don't deactivate your listings at the last minute.