by Steve Weber

#83, 11 December 2006

A Simple, Cheap Method
for Bulk Listing on Amazon

Selling on Amazon
Series

Printer Friendly Article

 
Have you ever wished there was a way to bulk-upload your new book listings to Amazon without buying software or paying subscription fees? Keep reading.

Amazon doesn't publicize it much but offers a free bulk-listing tool for Pro-Merchant sellers called "Inventory Loader." If you list dozens of new books each week on Amazon, switching to the Inventory Loader can save lots of time. You'll upload your books all at once, instead of one at a time.

After a bit of practice with the Inventory Loader, you can input your new listings in a matter of seconds, just by plugging in a few bits of information. It sure beats clicking the "Sell Yours Here" button and waiting for Amazon's seemingly endless Web pages to load.

Besides the time savings, the Inventory Loader brings two valuable side benefits: It generates backup copies of all your listings, which you can save to your PC. And using this handy data file, you can list your inventory on additional selling venues if you wish.

To use the Inventory Loader, you'll need to use "spreadsheet" software. Don't worry, it's not as hard as it sounds, and free programs are available. If you're using a Windows computer, you might already have Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Works, both of which allow you to manage spreadsheets. If you don't have Excel or Works - or you're using a Mac - there's an excellent free open-source suite called OpenOffice, which includes a spreadsheet program. You can download OpenOffice here.

I've been using OpenOffice for about a year, and it's hard to tell the difference between it and Microsoft Office. In fact, I like OpenOffice better.

What Is a Spreadsheet?

A spreadsheet is a grid of information, a table. It's an easy way to manage a bunch of data, like book listings. Across the top row are the "fields" of information, columns labeled "Item name," "Price," "Condition", etc. Each descending row contains the particulars about one of your listings.

Here's a simplified example:

ISBN
Price
Expedited shipping
0743226720
12.00
Y
0446310786
  5.25
N

The top horizontal row shows our data fields, such as ISBN, price, and shipping mode. Each row below is one of our new listings. We indicate the ISBN, our price, and whether or not we're offering international shipping on that listing. When we're finished, we'll upload the data to Amazon, and within minutes, all those listings will be live.

Ready to get started? It's best to try this out with a single book, just to make sure everything's working correctly.

First, let's get a copy of Amazon's Inventory Loader template, which saves us the trouble of designing our spreadsheet from scratch. Using your Explorer browser, go here.

Now let's save this template to our hard drive: In your browser, click File, Save as, and name the file Template.xls.

Now let's open our template using the spreadsheet software, Excel, Works, or OpenOffice. Click File, Open, and your file name, template.xls.

Entering Our Listing

Now we'll populate the data fields for our first listing, from left to right:

  1. product-id. Here we'll enter the book's ISBN in the rectangle directly beneath the rectangle labeled product-id. (For other types of products we might enter a UPC code or Amazon's ASIN for that item.)

    Before we go further, we should discuss a quirk of most spreadsheet programs. They don't like most ISBNs because they often begin with zero. Spreadsheets usually lop off the leading zero, reading it as an error. Here's how to prevent our ISBNs from getting mangled: Click the top gray rectangle on your spreadsheet, the one labeled A. This will select (darken) your column labeled product-id. Then click Format, Cells. Click Number, Text, and click OK. This formats our ISBN column as text, so the leading zeros won't be erased.

  2. product-id-type. Enter "2," which indicates we're using ISBNs.

  3. item-condition. Instead of typing in the words to indicate "Very Good," "Acceptable, etc., we only need to type in a number, such as:

    Like New = 1
    Very Good = 2
    Good = 3
    Acceptable = 4
    New = 11

  4. Price. Just the number and two decimal places, no dollar sign. (This is a good time to eyeball competing listings. Copy the ISBN from your spreadsheet and search for it on Amazon.)

  5. SKU. If you're not already using SKUs, we'll explain this one later. For now, just enter a placeholder, like A1.

  6. Quantity. Enter "1."

  7. add-delete. Enter "A "because we're adding this listing to our inventory.

  8. will-ship-internationally. Enter "Y" if you're offering international shipping on this listing. Otherwise, enter "N."

  9. expedited-shipping. Same as above, enter "Y" for yes, "N" for no.

  10. item-note. Here's where you'll enter your Sellers Comments, such as "torn dust jacket," etc.

  11. item-is-marketplace. Enter "Y."

That's it. The next two fields will be populated with Amazon's catalog information after you upload. And the remaining fields don't apply to Marketplace listings, only auctions.

Now we'll save our upload file on our disk as a text file. Click, File, Save As and give your spreadsheet a file name, such as upload.txt. There's also a pull-down menu where you can indicate the file type. Be sure to indicate "Text, tab-delimited."

And now we'll upload the file. From your Seller Account page's middle column, click "Upload multiple items." Select the file type (tab-delimited) and the upload option "Add/Modify/Delete."

In a moment you'll receive an e-mail from Amazon with the status of your upload. If everything was correct, it will indicate "1 items activated."



 Subscribe in a reader
Google
BookThink
www