Amazon Seller Support Blog (Amazon.co.uk)

Ideas to boost your sales in spring

 

With the dark winter days drawing to a close, Amazon shoppers are looking forward to the arrival of spring and the Easter holidays. Cast an imaginative eye over your selection to ensure you can offer what your customers are looking for at this optimistic time of year. Think about chocolate* and decorations for the Easter celebrations, sports and cold-weather gear* for last-minute winter getaways and all those garden and outdoor products for family weekends and holidays.

*The following stores require prior approval to start selling in: Apparel, Grocery, Beauty, Health & Personal Care, Jewellery and Watches.

The Right Product at the Right Time

The business reports section (Seller Central login required) can give you valuable sales and traffic insight to help you fine-tune your range to accommodate the seasonal shoppers.

• Look at what you were selling this time last year – have you got sufficient inventory of the key sellers and could you look at bringing in any similar products to drive additional sales?

• Can you take advantage of the seasonal demand to clear out relevant slow-movers or aged inventory?

• Take a look at the Page Views metrics for your best-selling seasonal lines - perhaps there is more you can do to increase the view-to-order conversion rate for your offers, such as a slight price adjustment or adding more product information to the detail page.

Promote your products

Remember how attractive promotions can be for shoppers browsing on Amazon; a promotion could lead to a spontaneous buying decision by highlighting your offer over those of your competitors. There is a variety of promotional options available for you to choose from. More information on:

• Creating promotions (Seller Central login required)
• Various promotion types (Seller Central login required)
• Managing promotions (Seller Central login required)

Please note: Software and Video Games products orders are excluded from free-shipping promotions. BMVD Products are excluded from all promotions.

Key factors that affect purchase decisions on Amazon

Did you know that “product details” are the key factor influencing purchase decisions on Amazon (Amazon Customer Experience Study)?

In fact, all successful retailers know that if their offers are well presented and easy to find, customers are much more likely to buy them and, more importantly, come back again. Good presentation really does boost sales.  

With the huge array of offers on display on Amazon.co.uk, it is critical that your product listings maintain the excellent standard of detail and discoverability that our customers expect. Therefore, we recommend you to check the Listing Style Guidelines Amazon put at your disposal in order to ensure that your products are discoverable, attractive, accurate and, most importantly, sellable.

These guides are easy-to follow manuals, with clear examples of "do’s and don’ts" and provide information on everything you need to create a great product listing, for both content and discoverability, including product title, images, bullet points, product descriptions, brand and manufacturer, model & part number, what's in the box, search terms, browse and refinements.
There is also information specific to your method of data upload – whether via the Add a Product tool in Seller Central or via inventory file templates.

For more information about creating high quality listings, search for “listing quality” in the Seller Central search bar.

Finally, don’t forget to register for our upcoming webinar on the topic:

Create your product listings and improve your listing quality
Tuesday, 19^th March 2013: 11AM-12PM UK time
Level: Beginners / Topic: Product listings

Broaden your knowledge and sign up for Amazon’s upcoming educational webinars

Amazon is striving to pass on helpful information to make you more successful with your business and your use of Amazon’s Seller tools, features and reports.

In this context, we regularly offer free webinars, meaning one-hour online training sessions for sellers, which are presented by Amazon experts. Topics include:  

• Product listing quality
• Seller performance
• Selling internationally
• Fulfilment by Amazon
• New program/ services/tool launches

The webinars are aimed at new, as well as existing sellers, interested in driving their business on the European Amazon Marketplaces.

You can participate in these webinars either by registering via the Amazon Services website or you can subscribe to our webinar invitation mailing list. Amazon experts will be at your disposal to answer your questions during the webinar.

Don’t miss our upcoming sessions on the following topics:

• Create your product listings and improve your listing quality

Tuesday, 19th March 2013: 11AM-12PM UK time
Level: Beginners / Topic: Product Listings

• View all upcoming webinars for Europe

Finally, in case you missed or could not attend a session, all past webinar presentations and recordings are available on the Amazon Services website.

Feedback collected from sellers, who have already participated:

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).