The Add a Product Tool

When you are approved to sell your products on Amazon, you are granted access to their Seller Central web interface. Seller Central allows you to control most aspects of your business as conducted through Amazon: listing and de-listing products, managing your orders, providing shipping notices, collecting payment from Amazon, viewing statistics and reports, and managing your Amazon storefront, policies, and promotions. Under the Inventory tab, you’ll notice a link labeled “Add a Product”. This process begins with a simple form that allows you to located the product already on Amazon, which is necessary due to Amazon’s single product page per product. (If the product doesn’t already exist on Amazon, you can create a new product.)

Amazon's Add a Product Tool

After you enter your search terms, Amazon will return with a list of products in their catalog that match your search. Click the “Sell Yours” button beside it, fill in your information, and you’re off.

This is great for a couple of products, if that’s all you have. But sooner or later you realize that by the time you’ve listed all 3000 of your products, you’ll be dead – and your range of products will have changed a couple of hundred times anyway. After all, most of us have products come and go from our catalog all the time!

Seller Desktop

Amazon Seller Desktop

Seller Desktop is a free desktop application that gives you a GUI for listing your products. It is almost always quicker than doing them one-by-one through the Add a Product tool. With Seller Desktop, you can list products, create variations, and upload everything to Amazon when you’re ready. However, if you work on a Mac you’re out of luck: Seller Desktop is for Windows only. It’s also pretty slow when you upload your listings, especially if you have a large catalog.

So while Seller Desktop is much better for larger merchants than doing products one-by-one, you’ll also want to take a look at the flat-file upload.

Upload Products via a Flat File

Here’s where my saving grace came in when we first starting selling on Amazon. I realized that with the first two methods, I was basically reinventing the wheel when it came to my data. I already had almost every piece of data already in my shopping cart catalog. If I just made some custom fields to fill in the missing data (like a certain format for recommended ages, the UPC code, and the vendor SKU) then I could export everything from my catalog into a tab-delimited flat file and upload that to Amazon in one fell swoop. Hallelujah!

The flat-file format is pretty daunting, so this might be easier than it sounds. The format depends on the category of items that you’re selling and the revision number of the flat file format. The format I use has 92 (yes, NINETY-TWO) individual columns. And many columns have a very limited set of allowed values. But we used a feed module to easily generate this file. Once the definition was originally set up, the click of a link was all it took to produce the file. Then we logged into seller central, uploaded the flat file, and waiting while Amazon processed it. (Usually inside of an hour.)

Moving to True Automation

A single pain point still existed for us, though…inventory management. When the holiday shopping season begins each year, our own website and our sales on Amazon start competing with each other for our inventory – and if something sells out on one site, we want to make sure we don’t oversell it on the other site! Up through last year, we were uploading inventory-only flat files and just dealing with errors when they occur. This year, (warning: plug coming) we’ve got an automated feed management service call FeedExact, something NetBlazon has developed in house, that will sync up the inventory on a schedule we determine. Perfecto!

Obviously, the method you choose for managing your products on Amazon will depend on the size of your catalog, how frequently it changes, your budget, and your patience level. Fortunately, we have options, so it’s just a matter of finding the one with the fewest pain points for your business. Here’s to happy retailing on the world’s largest e-commerce site.

Stay tuned, our next post will be about understanding seller metrics and how they are affect your ability to reach customers on Amazon.

For an updated and more in-depth look at product descriptions, go to Adding More Content to Product Descriptions.

There’s no doubt that, on the web, a thousand words is worth quite a bit more than a picture! At least, that maxim holds true when one things of search engine optimization. While shoppers love images, search engines love words. The problem is that writing good product copy is time-consuming, and, for some of us, downright difficult.

Many of us sell products that aren’t unique to our website. The products you sell – toys, kitchen supplies, home decor, etc. – may also be carried by a number of other retailers. Often, the manufacturers of these products offer canned product descriptions for use on the web. Although the quality of the writing of these descriptions may range from poor to excellent, keep in mind that even the most well-written descriptions, if used by other sites, may have less value to the search engines than copywriting that is both unique and compelling.

Remember that the best product descriptions have the following values:

1. They are unique to your website
2. They are keyword-dense for SEO purposes, but above all, read well for human visitors
3. They are long enough to convey the information needed to make a purchase decision
4. They are simple enough for people to understand without thinking too hard

One of the resources we love is 73 Ways to Describe a Widget. This ebook helps jump-start your brain when you need to figure out how to describe what you’re selling. For example:

• What occasion is the item appropriate for?
• How will the buyer feel when using your product?
• How long has this item been selling?

Another website that has a lot of useful information about copywriting is Marketing Words. In fact, that’s how I found out about the 73 widgets ebook. There’s also a nice article at Vitamin.

However, it helps to also keep it simple. Don’t forget the basics: color, size, weight, texture, materials, skills required to use the product, advantages, and uses. Remember that it’s the words on your site that attract the search engines and also convince users to make a purchase.

If you’re building your first ecommerce site, the idea of choosing a convention for your product codes may seem like a trivial task. After all, the product code is typically something that is primarily internal to your business, so what difference does the format make to your customers? The answer is, probably none. But it could make a huge difference on how you manage your stock, your customer service, your sales, and your marketing.

One of the first considerations is whether your shopping cart builds URLs based on your product codes. For example, Miva Merchant’s default urls to product pages contain the product code as part of the querystring. Consider this example:

http://www.yourstore.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=ABC123

Note the last part of the URL – “ABC123″. That is the code for our hypothetical product. Now, consider what the URL might look like if you employ URL-rewriting strategies as part of your SEO work:

http://www.yourstore.com/p-ABC123.html

Although SEO experts still heavily debate the benefit of having keywords in your URLs, you can see how replacing “ABC123″ with a keyword-based product code, such as “coiled-garden-hose” could give you a search engine boost!

That’s how we started life with our toy store WonderBrains. Our product codes included “4-childrens-card-games”,”magnetic-poetry-original-kit”, and other keyword-based product codes along those same lines. This gave WonderBrains a search engine boost at the time (and I feel they still have some positive effect now). However, we quickly ran up against filename limits. Miva Merchant supports 50 characters for its product codes, but QuickBooks only supports 31. That caused some issues when we tried to synchronize inventory levels between the two systems, because Quickbooks truncated any product codes longer than 31 characters. Later, we introduced Photoshop actions to batch-process images, and discovered a 27-character limit when saving files (until we discovered the value of unchecking the Mac OS compatibility flag).

Another consideration we had was the fact that we wanted to introduce a catalog in 2008. That meant phone orders. It didn’t make sense for customers to call in and ask to order item “calico dash critters dash deluxe dash village dash house”! This was another justification for shorter product codes. We decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and change the product codes on over 2000 items.

We settled on a format consisting of a two-letter prefix followed by 6 digits. The two characters uniquely represent a vendor. Putting these first allow us to sort our picklist by product code, and end up with a picklist where items from each vendor are grouped together (based on that 2-letter prefix). Since our warehouse is organized by vendor, that made picking items much quicker – an immediate payoff. The new format also solved the problem of synchronizing inventory levels between Miva Merchant and Quickbooks, and we switched to Easy Inventory Update to make that task go a lot smoother. The new format will also allow customers to more easily order an item by phone when the catalog is released later this year.

Whatever format you choose, there can be a lot of effects down the road among the various systems you will need to run your business. Consider not only your shopping cart, but also your fulfillment software, your CRM package, your customer needs, your warehouse, or anything else that could be affected by the format. It’s easiest to get it right the first time, then it is to change it after your catalog has grown to a large size and your site has taken a firm hold in the search engines!