The Amazon Product Feed
The purpose of Amazon content is to help your products get discovered organically and improve their relevancy for Sponsored Products.
Additionally, Amazon product content provides customers with detailed information about the product(s) they buy to help them feel confident about their purchase(s).
“You can’t interact with a product the same way you would in a brick and mortar,” Nick Sandberg, Marketplace Channel Analyst at CPC Strategy said.
“You can’t pick it up, feel how much it weighs, or look at it’s dimensions or colors. So, what we want to do is replicate that experience as much as possible,”
“On an ecommerce site you can display a lot more, but Amazon is much more restricted. With Amazon we have to leverage high quality images that are zoomable and video (if applicable).”
“Bullet points and descriptions are also extremely important because they help to take the place of the interaction that buyers would normally have with a product found in a store.”
In the example below we compare the differences in titles, descriptions, images and bullet points in a good Amazon product page vs. a poorly created Amazon product page.
Example of rich Amazon product content…
vs. example of poor Amazon product content…
An inventory upload, also known as an Amazon Product Feed (as seen below) is the process of providing Amazon with inventory-related information such as UPC/EAN/ISBN, title, price, quantity, etc.
This information enables Amazon to list your item for sale against the right product detail page in the Amazon catalog.
Amazon sellers can manipulate and optimize their product content using Amazon’s user interface or via Excel-based templates in different formats.
Sellers can choose the appropriate template, add their inventory information and save the data in tab-delimited text file format. This text file can then be uploaded for processing through Upload Multiple Items option in the Manage Your Inventory section from Seller Account.
Pro-Tip: Thousands of sellers submit thousands of inventory feeds to Amazon feed processing systems around the clock. These inventory feeds are processed in the order received.
For this article we will focus on the Inventory File Template. This template is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that contains multiple columns for describing and listing your products. It also contains definitions for each column.
A number of files are available for uploading your inventory to Amazon. The file you choose will depend on your specific needs, and you may find it helpful to use different file types for different purposes (see below).
How to Make Changes to the Amazon Product Feed
When making changes or updating your Amazon Product Feed there are several best practices every seller should follow including:
1) Amazon UI: For product content changes to a small number of SKUs, most sellers can manage their inventory changes within Amazon’s user interface (as seen below):
2) Amazon Category Listing Report: For Amazon sellers who needs to make product feed changes to a large number of SKUs we recommend they download the Category Listing Report. You will have to request this from Seller Central.
Pro-Tip: Be sure to save the original template, just incase you make a mistake. That way it’s much easier to change your product content back to the way it was before rather than starting all over.
3) Amazon Flat File Upload: When using the Flat File Upload – only update the content that you wish to change. Leave all the other fields the way they are. The reason for that is – if you do make errors – it’s easier to track down what those errors were. Keep it simple.
Always do a partial update. Run all changes with a small group of products only changing one field at a time. That way you can work through any errors, and it won’t apply to your entire catalog.
4) Feed Load Time: Usually you can see any updates to your product feed right away – but in the event you can’t (within a four hour period) – wait at least 24 hours before contacting Amazon Customer Support. In our experience, the Amazon feed team is helpful working through any potential errors.
5) Amazon Product Variations: If a parent child variation doesn’t exist in the category you are trying to sell in, you can use the feed to leverage a category that does have the variation option to create the variation you want on your page.
For example, in the Electronics Category, sellers can not have parent – child relationships (also known as a variation field). But, they can place the product in a similar field, for example Wireless Accessories and utilize that category’s ability to build out a variation.
Even though your product is technically a “consumer electronic product” you can leverage the Wireless Accessories feed to create the variation.
Be aware that at the end of the day Amazon is going to categorize your product. It’s likely they will re-categorize your product.
Why does Amazon do this?
Because otherwise sellers would try and game the system. For example, a seller could try selling a cell phone in a different category so that they can rank higher rather than sell in the Wireless Accessories category which is already saturated with cell phone products.
Even though Amazon will determine and change the category your product sells in – the variation will stick regardless even if the product is moved into a different category type.
For more tips on how to make changes to your Amazon Product Feed, email [email protected]
