Amazon Seller Support Blog (Amazon.co.uk)

Adverse weather conditions in the UK may affect the delivery of orders

Adverse weather is impacting deliveries across the country and may delay deliveries of orders in time for Christmas. We encourage you to contact buyers about the status of any deliveries that may be delayed. Buyers appreciate efforts to keep them informed about their orders.

We also encourage you to be realistic with your delivery estimates and take account of your carrier’s advice on the effect of weather. You can for example reduce the time you need to process orders in order to allow extra delivery time. The lead time to ship by default is set at 2 working days.

If you don’t think you can meet your current Christmas delivery promises, you can temporarily remove your products from the website, as follows:

1. Set all of your listings to "Inactive" status (for more information, search on "holiday settings" in Seller Help)
2. Or, set the inventory quantity of each listing to "0".

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.

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.

Automating your data exchange with Amazon

If you upload our template files via Seller Central rather than maintain your product data and orders manually via Seller Central, you may wonder how to automate this data exchange process between your local computer and your Seller Central account.

For this purpose, Amazon provides you with the “Amazon Merchant Transport Utility” (AMTU) which is offered free of charge. You can have AMTU exchange your data just by dragging and dropping the files into AMTU’s “outgoing” folder. If you think of an email program such as Microsoft Outlook – content that has been placed into the program’s outbound folder will be automatically transferred. AMTU works in the same way.

AMTU allows you to transfer file content to your Seller Central account. In addition, it also allows you to have reports such as your order and settlement reports automatically transferred to your local computer without having to go into Seller Central and downloading those files manually. If your data warehouse system is able to process and generate those Amazon files, then implementing a fully automated way of communicating with Amazon is made very easy. Every AMTU installation will run as a background service on your computer and therefore will also be available if a seller has not logged on to that computer.

AMTU is available for all major operating systems (Windows, Max, Linux, BSD). The program (which includes localised program documentation in English, French and German language) can be downloaded from the AMTU web site http://amtu.sourceforge.net. Please check if your system matches the technical requirements listed in the product documentation. For example, you cannot install AMTU on a computer that already hosts a web server. In addition, AMTU is currently not supported for Microsoft Windows Vista/7 operating systems.

Go to the AMTU web site, download the program binary that matches your operating system requirements, unzip the archive and then start the installation process. A detailed description of the installation process, valid across all operating systems, can be found in the program documentation. Note that it is mandatory to run the AMTU installation process with active Administrator/root access rights. Once the program has been installed, you will need to configure AMTU. Besides your Seller Central user credentials (email address and password), the configuration process also requires the “merchant token”. The merchant token can be accessed in Seller Central; go to the “Settings  Account Info” section. The merchant token can be found at the bottom of the page (e.g. M_MYMERCHANT_12345).

Use the program documentation for the configuration of your AMTU account setup. At the end of the process, AMTU will try to authenticate your user credentials by validating them on the Amazon server. When this process is successful, AMTU will be installed as a background service on your local computer.

Once installed, you can simply drop your product feeds, shipping confirmations etc into AMTU’s “Outgoing” folder in order to have these files transferred and processed. AMTU will check its “Outgoing” folder every five minutes. If there are new files, AMTU will automatically transfer them to your Seller Central account where the files are processed. AMTU will then move those files from its “Outgoing” folder to the “Sent” box, thus preventing the same file being sent twice to your account. Once the files have been processed, AMTU’s “Processing Reports” folder will contain the appropriate processing report files.

AMTU also transfers settlement reports and order reports directly to your computer once these files are available on Seller Central – so no manual interaction is required. Please note that if you are interested in receiving XML order/settlement reports, you will first need to get in touch with our Seller Support team – we will then need to configure your account for XML usage.

Summary: AMTU is a very easy way of automating your data transfers with Amazon. Further information about AMTU can be found on the AMTU web site http://amtu.sourceforge.net and in the program documentation.

Jörg