Seven Areas for Seller Success on Amazon

We’ll be highlighting seven areas for seller success to help you sell more successfully during the holiday season and into 2011! So check back often and don’t miss out on the inside scoop as we’ll be focusing on the following …

• Signing up
• Product Listing
• Order Fulfillment
• Returns, Refunds, & Cancellations
• Business Information & Policies
• Marketing your Products
• Buyer Communications

Amazon Products Ads: Reports

Product Ads sellers have access to two types of reports: Product Reports and Performance Reports.

Product Reports

Product Reports help you identify products that are not being advertised on Amazon due to processing errors or violations of the Product Ads Content Guidelines. There are two kinds of Product Reports:

1. Processing report: This report is generated automatically after your feed finishes processing.  It displays errors for products that didn’t make it into the catalog (or made it in, but with warnings). To download this report, go to the Products tab in your seller account and select "Upload Product Ads."

 

The report is a tab-delimited text file you can open and read in a program such as Microsoft Excel or Notepad. Each row in your feed is referred to as a record. At the top of the processing report you see a summary of records that were or were not successfully processed. For example:

Feed Processing Summary:
Number of records processed: 1045
Number of records successful: 1030

If there are errors with individual records, you see the following information for each error:

Element	Description
original-record-number	The record number in the original file you uploaded where the error occurred. The first two rows of your feed are not considered records. Therefore, an error in record one corresponds to line three in your template.
error-code	A number used by Amazon.com to identify the error message.
error-type	One of two values, error or warning. Warnings refer to data that was successfully processed, but might not appear as intended. Errors refer to data that is inadequate or flawed in some way that prevents the record from processing successfully.
error-message	A brief explanation of the error. The error message might suggest corrective measures.

For more help in correcting the errors you receive, please refer the Data Definitions tab in your product feed template, or search on "identifying errors and warnings" and "fixing errors" in Seller Central Help.

2. Product report: This report displays all products successfully processed, including both active and suspended skus. To request this report, go to the Products tab in your seller account and click "Download Product Report."

Depending on the number of skus you have uploaded, it can take up to 45 minutes to generate the report. Once the report is generated, click the "Download" button and save the tab-delimited .txt file to your computer. You can open the file using Excel or Notepad. For more information, search on "download product report" in Seller Central Help.

Performance reports

The following reports provide information on the performance of your ads:

1. Performance Over Time:  Summarizes your clicks and spend over a specified time period.
2. Performance By Category: Lists your click totals and costs by category.
3. Performance By SKU: Provides Impressions, Clicks, and Spend for each of your products listed on Amazon.com.

To learn more about these reports, search on "performance reports" in Seller Central Help.

To access these reports, go to the Reports tab in your seller account and click "Ad Performance."

 

Getting Paid - How It Works

To get paid for your Amazon sales, you’ll need to:

Enter valid bank account information in your seller account
You are required to have valid bank account information on file in your seller account. This is the account to which Amazon will disburse your payments. You can always change your bank account information later, if needed. For security reasons, you will not be able to request disbursement for 7 days after you make any changes. It can take up to 5 business days for funds to be transferred to your bank account.

Enter valid credit card information in your seller account
Your credit card information is used for verification purposes prior to the transfer of funds to your bank account. We do not transfer funds to your credit card. You can always change your credit card information, as needed, for example if you cancel your card or it expires.

Confirm shipment of your orders
To receive payment, you are required to confirm shipment of orders. Once you confirm shipment, the buyer is charged and we credit your Payments account. If you do not confirm shipment of an order within 30 days, we may cancel the order and you will not be paid. Learn more about confirming orders in our online "Charge When Ship" Help page.

New seller
For new sellers, there is an initial 14-day holding period before funds are disbursed to your bank account. This holding period is an important security requirement and is applied to all new seller accounts. After the initial 14-day holding period has passed, the funds credited to your Payments account are automatically disbursed to your bank account.

Pro sellers: Decrease feed processing time with Pricing and Inventory feeds

Attention Professional sellers who use inventory templates (feeds) to list on Amazon.com: When you only want to update the prices and quantities of your listings, you can use Pricing and Inventory feeds to speed up processing time.

To create a Pricing and Inventory feed, just eliminate from your feed any product data that typically does not change (particularly Product, Relationship and Image information). Then upload that feed to Amazon using the Upload tool in your seller account.

Below are the fields required for creation of Pricing and Inventory feeds:

• sku, item-price, currency – this will update just your price (you can also submit sale prices in this feed)
• sku, quantity, leadtime-to-ship – this will update your quantity; leadtime-to-ship must be included if the item does not have the default 1-2 day leadtime-to-ship

You can maintain a separate feed that contains full product data that you can upload when that data changes.

Get an "A" in Listing Textbooks 101

Back-to-school textbook season is a busy time of year! Save yourself the hassle of cancelled listings and returned orders by following a few basic rules when you list your textbooks.

List your textbook by ISBN, not by title

Avoid listing your textbook against the wrong detail page by using the ISBN and not the title. One title can have several editions, and each one could have a detail page in our catalog. You'll need to match the book to the exact ISBN, title, author, edition, binding, publisher, and publication date that is listed on the detail page. Even if the title and author of your book appear on a detail page, you will be listing the wrong edition or cover type if the ISBN of your book does not match the one on the page. Learn more about Listing Items.

Use the search fields on the main Textbooks store page on Amazon.com to find the right detail page for your textbook. If you search for your book's ISBN and don't find an exact match, you can create a new catalog page for your book (Pro Merchants only). If you are an Individual seller and cannot find a detail page for your book, you may not sell that book on Amazon.com.

Describe your book accurately

Check each book you list for wear, such as marks, highlighting, worn binding or jackets, and so on. Use the listing comments to add notes about the book's condition. When you describe your book’s condition accurately, you reduce the chances of buyer disappointment and returns.

Don't list prohibited editions of textbooks

Most editions of textbooks are fine to sell on Amazon.com, but some are prohibited. For example, teacher's editions and international editions of textbooks are prohibited. Listings for prohibited textbook editions will be cancelled by Amazon and can result in the suspension or removal of your selling privileges. Learn more about our Textbook Selling Policies.

 

Am I required to include tracking information?

Delivery confirmation or tracking information, while not required, is beneficial to buyers. Including tracking information for your shipments can help buyers verify the status of their packages and anticipate the delivery of their items. If you use tracking information, be sure to enter it when confirming the shipment of your items.

 

Signature confirmation is encouraged for high-value items because it helps verify the items reached the buyer. If an A-to-z Guarantee claim is filed for non-receipt, and signature confirmation verifies your item was delivered to the buyer or another recipient on behalf of the buyer, the A-to-z Guarantee team may deny the claim.

Textbook Selling Tip: List your book by ISBN

Students will search for textbooks by ISBN. Before listing, make sure the ISBN of your book matches the Amazon page.

You must list your item against a product detail page in our catalog for that exact item. If you enter your book's ISBN into our system and cannot find an exact match, it means that Amazon.com does not currently have that item in the catalog.

Important announcements for sellers: Where to find them

Occasionally we hear from sellers who aren't aware of an update for seller accounts, so here's a quick how-to for finding our announcements and technical notifications:

Announcements of changes

Scroll through the center section of your seller account home page to find the "Headlines" section, or just search (Ctrl/F) on "headlines" to get right to the announcements.

We leave most announcements up for two weeks, but for staying on top of the news, we recommend scanning the headlines for new announcements once or twice a day.

Technical notifications

If we have a technical issue to report, or if something else is happening that could affect sellers (extreme weather, for example), we post technical notifications near the top of your home page.

Checking for a technical notification can help you save time, sidestep worry, and take effective action in these and other types of situations: 

• You experience a technical problem while using your seller account and you wonder if the problem is based in your seller account or in your own system
• You hear of a situation that could affect shipping, and you wonder if Amazon has provided any related information

We update technical notifications as a situation changes, and we remove them when the issue is resolved.