Everyone knows how notoriously difficult it is to get started on Amazon these days.
Gone are the days when, with just a little bit of work, you could find a product category to sell in that had the potential, from research and looking / copying similar products, to earn a few grand.
Allegedly all you had to do - open a professional seller account, source your product, create a new listing or, if you were adding to the existing catalogue just create a unique SKU to include your marketplace offer for consideration by the algorithmically factored 'BuyBox', ship your items into the relevant Amazon fulfilment centre (Amazon doesn't call them 'warehouses' because Amazonian's have their own language for everything) for FBA, then wait for your products to index and rank on the site before the orders start to roll in.
More experienced private label sellers would, of course, also be looking to get brand registered and run paid advertising. Traditionally these have always been areas where most Amazon sellers hit the major bumps in the road and they have always required a level of technical expertise and knowledge that only comes with a bit of skin in the game.
But, on the whole, with Amazon being a highly process driven organisation, a lot has been said and written in the past on the subject of the ordinary Joe who with an understanding of the basics and 1-2k of start-up capital could launch a product and scale up towards riches inside a 3 - 5 year timescale that would be unthinkable in most other start-up environments. If you don't believe me just ask any four figure course seller or guru sipping Margarita on a beach in Hawaii...
My own personal view though is that it has never been that easy. Running any kind of business requires skills that most people don't possess; that's why most of the workers in the world remain employees. But, and this is crucial, the Amazon systems were at best benign for a long, long time before Amazon decided to start tightening up on its internal rules and compliance. This has led to an entire industry of Amazon agencies offering expert help on every aspect of account management. In fact theres probably more money to be made in that than there is in the day to day selling of physical product and any profit you do make from retail sales almost exclusively needs to be reinvested and not withdrawn for the founder's enjoyment. You generally only take your money when you make your exit.
The reality of selling today is that it has become increasingly complex. So complex in fact that Seller Support are seemingly unable to guide you though the myriad of issues or understand basic cause and effects of the failures that routinely occur when sellers attempt to follow Amazon's own processes. It's not really their fault to be honest; Amazon is just too big and siloed within its staff divisions. What it needs is much more efficient routing of seller support issues. Perhaps this is where AI may appear in the future; I hope so. But to give you one example of how ridiculously difficult and complicated selling has become please allow me to share a recent experience of creating and uploading a small product set using an Amazon flat file.
A flat file for those who have never used one before is simply a spreadsheet template containing product data for direct upload into the Amazon catalogue. I'd never heard the term 'flat file' before selling on Amazon five years ago and I can only assume it's another Amazonian expression (feel free to message me if I'm completely wrong on this!). Now, I'm very familiar with product data files in CSV and Excel formats (and more recently Google Sheets, my preferred tool these days) having used them extensively to load hundreds of products at a time into Shopify ecommerce sites and even into eBay. In fact it's one of my stock in trade skills and a professional business service that I offer over at KWS Ecommerce
Over the course of my time managing Amazon accounts I've become pretty good (IMHO) at building - and fixing - flat files. The inevitable error reports that often accompany the first and second pass attempts at uploading require a bit of an analytical brain and a trial-and-error mindset to resolve issues one by one until you get to the root cause of what is preventing a successful upload. On this occasion though every attempt at a solution has so far ended in failure and, as an experienced seller, it's been an extremely frustrating and time consuming process.
We started with the build of a 22 product Parent / Child variation file. I won't go into the details of what that entails here but for those interested this video will give you a heads up. Because this was a product relaunch I was very clear from the beginning that I wanted to capture as much relevant data as possible - not just the basic required fields but as many of the optional product attributes as well. The flat file template that I downloaded for the category had the following sections:
- Required
- Images
- Variation information
- Basic Product information
- Item discovery information - These attributes have an effect on how customers can find your product on the site using browse or search
- Product Enrichment - These attributes create rich product listings for your buyers
- Product Dimensions - These attributes specify the size and weight of a product
- Fulfillment - These columns provide fulfilment-related information for orders fulfilled either by Amazon (FBA) or by the Seller
- Compliance Information - Attributes used to comply with consumer laws in the country or region where the item is sold
- Offer Information - These attributes are required to make your item buyable for customers on the site.
- b2b
Each section contained multiple flat file fields and the complete template had a potential fillable field list of 256 columns. It's worth highlighting that in addition to the section "Required" featuring 24 columns of required data the "Compliance Information" section also had 22 fields of required data too. All of the fields in sections above are detailed within the flat file inside a tab called "Data Definitions" which gives the definitions for use, accepted values, an example accepted value and an indicator to state if it is a required or optional field. So far ... so good....if a little tedious dare I say ...
As this is Amazon the data entry into the flat file is relatively well structured in that many fields are only allowable from a list of available entries and these are contained within a separate tab on the sheet called "Valid Values". Most of these are fixed values eg. Unit Count Type (such as count, gram, meter, millilitre, square meter) a few allow you to add Not Applicable or Unknown.
Another consideration to bear in mind is that if one particular field is filled in it may open up another dependant field. This is the case even if both of those fields are defined as optional. For example if under the Offer Information section you add the optional Map Price, Manufacturer's suggested retail price, Item Price or Sale Price, then you must also enter an additional (optional) Currency code. Note - the actual price your item is sold for on Amazon is Your Price (or standard_price) which is contained within the data fields under the "Required" section.
Now came the fun part, the bit which originally tripped me up: Compliance and specifically the fields dealing with batteries. Here they are in full:
The first thing to say here is that my products are in the (non-alcoholic) beverages category and so do not contain nor require batteries. Nonetheless for my specific flat file template there are multiple required fields. It's commonplace to just select
No for the "batteries_required" attribute and in fact when we have created similar products previously (same category, same type) around 9 months ago we encountered no issues leaving the other fields blank. But adding values to "battery_type1 - battery_type3", "number_of_lithium_metal_cells" or "lithium_battery_energy_content" seemed a nonsense really as none of these were applicable. Aside from I didn't want to inadvertently set the items up so that Amazon considered them to be
Hazmat as that would push them into potentially dangerous goods territory that would require a whole other load of certification.
Further down there are other fields relating to Hazmat: "supplier_declared_dg_hz_regulation1 - supplier_declared_dg_hz_regulation5", "hazmat_united_nations_regulatory_id" and "safety_data_sheet_url". I consulted with the product manager on this and he confirmed that no SDS are produced for our products - they don't require it.
Finally there are "ghs_classification_class1 - ghs_classification_class3" fields, again related to the SDS which were required but not applicable in our case.
After consulting online and watching some
Youtube from renowned flat file expert
Vanessa Hung of
Online Seller Solutions the conclusion was to populate this section as follows:
batteries_required: No; supplier_declared_dg_hz_regulation1: Not Applicable and leave the other irrelevant sections blank.
With the file complete and sense checked for potential errors and omissions I proceeded to try an upload. Curiously the upload created my parent SKUs however due to a few 'schoolboy' errors on my part a number of corrections were needed. Here was the Feed Processing Summary:
On the main template page Amazon go on to highlight the various product rows with errors. Column A gives the numbers of errors - I had 2 in each product row - and column B gives the number of attributes with other suggestions - essentially Amazon ignores the data in these but they do not prevent the file from creating the new products.
The errors were:
- Duplicate Country/Region Of Origin field so I had entered the United Kingdom twice somehow. Easy to fix, just delete one column.
- In the optional Serving Recommendation field I had also exceeded the maximum permitted number of characters in the text. As with error 1, a handy text tooltip appeared to give the necessary advice and it was an easy fix to simply reduce the text down to the allowed 50 characters while still keeping it relevant and informative to read.
For the curious, the report also highlighted warnings where I had put a value of zero in the Quantity (for the available stock) and where you have a designation for FBA using the value AMAZON_EU under Fulfillment Centre ID you are supposed to leave this blank, however this value was ignored.
On the parent SKU rows under relationship type this field should also be left blank as the Variation attribute declaration is only needed on the Child SKU rows
With all the above errors and warnings sorted I proceeded to re-upload the file again. This time we got a different, additional error - the infamous Amazon 8058....
The exact text stated: Some attributes are missing for SKU: [FP/SCBLND/ESP/1KGWB]. For more details, see http://sellercentral.amazon.co.uk/gp/errorcode/8058 so at this stage I assumed that my error related to 88 field attributes contained again the row for product SKU FP/SCBLND/ESP/1KGWB.
However when I flipped across to the template tab it was clear to see that the error was the same across all of my child SKUs with each one highlighted in orange:
(NB: I've obscured some details above to protect the identity of my products to some degree!)
So in total I posited that the 88 errors across 22 child SKUs meant that there were 4 field attribute errors that now needed fixing. At this point I was cursing Amazon as to why this wasn't made apparent on the first error processing report however I quickly remembered the many occasions in the past when I had fallen down the rabbit hole after opening the flat file Pandora's Box.
However, unlike the initial error where clear instructions point to what needs fixing, Amazon are incredibly unhelpful when it comes to identifying the issues behind error code 8058. Their help pages give the following explanation:
Essentially it was now a trial and error game of cat and mouse to locate the 4 potentially offending field attributes that were either invalid or missing data required to facilitate the upload correctly. Here are some the attempts I made:
1. As I'd previously removed some of what I'd considered to be irrelevant fields I added them back into the template again but left their values blank to see if the upload would pick up on the missing fields but were now containing a "null" value. This seemed to have no effect and the processing report returned the same error as the second upload attempt.
2. I then tried removing the batteries_required field altogether to see how this would impact the upload and strangely the number of errors reduced to from 88 to 22.
I guessed at this point that Amazon must process the template in a set order and have a hierarchy by which the errors are flagged. If you pass one section successfully then it will allow the reading of the next section however there may be further errors flagged if you do not populate those parts of the template correctly.
3. After adding the batteries_required field back in again and knowing that I had to find the missing 4 x 22 field attribute I tried updating the all of the available required Applicable Dangerous Goods Regulations fields. Previously I had only populated the first supplier_declared_dg_hz_regulation1 with the valid value of "Not Applicable" however there are 4 additional fields with this same attribute according to the Data Definitions tab. I figured it was worth a shot ruling this out....
....and once again this this made no difference.
4. For the next attempt I completely blanked all entries within the Applicable Dangerous Goods fields to see what would happen....
We were back again to just 22 errors! It seemed like Amazon was now stopping at an error on field supplier_declared_dg_hz_regulation1 and wasn't picking up anything else....
5. The next trial involved removing the parents altogether from the upload. On the very first attempt the parent SKUs had been created however they were showing in an "incomplete" status within the Seller Central dashboard. Clicking on any one of the parents revealed the message: This SKU has an inconsistent product classification with the ASIN. Please submit a feed to update this SKU to match the ASIN product classification. Another error to try and fix! At this point I abandoned the idea of creating parent / child variations and thought I would concentrate on trying to create the 22 standalone SKU's as these were the sellable items and then worry about putting them together later. Three attempts at uploading, each one failed....
In fact, rather annoyingly, as all products had failed to create I didn't even receive a downloadable process report as nothing had processed!
6. We then tried uploading each product Parent / Child variation individually rather than all 11 products on the same template. Almost clutching at straws by this stage. As with the bulk upload, just the parent loaded and the child SKU's had errors due to missing attributes.
In total 27 attempts (experiments) have been conducted to upload this flat file. Of course prior to the final attempts it was thought prudent to reach out to Seller Support for help. I wasn't overly confident if I'm being honest.
I tried my best to explain the problem:
I requested a call back as opposed to an email, stating that this was urgent. Within seconds the phone rang and I was explaining everything that I had put into my message over again. Just like every other call with Seller Support patience, politeness and understanding is a virtue. Even when you've reached the stage of wanting to throw your laptop against the wall ....
After carefully regurgitating the issue the associate at the other end advised me he would need to transfer the call to a colleague in the relevant team. After a nervous moment on hold I heard another voice requesting me to explain the problem. Deja vu.....
Thirty seconds into repeating myself, again, the line went suspiciously quiet. Damn (or words to that effect)....I've lost connection to Seller Support!
No problem I thought. I will just attach screenshots and keep the original case log going. A few hours later I received a reply....
Not what I was hoping for exactly but not altogether a surprise either. Just a scripted response to my enquiry based on what they thought I was having trouble with. This is all too common with Amazon Seller Support unless you can actually get through to a member of the team who deals in the very specific problem area that you are encountering.
I went back to them emphasising the detail....
But yet again the vagueness continued with the latest response....
There was one factual error in the last reply back from Amazon, namely that it states that "Your processing report will show you the SKU number of the product and the field name that was not filled out". Clearly, in none of the processing reports were the field names for the missing values identified. If they had have been none of the above would have been necessary. As I write this, my next port of call, will be to respond back to see if I can get Seller Support to help me identify the missing ones.
Following on from my final adventures of trying to create the products through a flat file upload I decided to try creating a product manually inside Seller Central. Let's just say another world of problems opened up inside the "More Details" tab, not least because certain values only available from within a dropdown list were rendering as invalid upon selection. Bizarre is putting it mildly.
Still, we press on, as failure is not an option and, besides, the orders are being placed next week so the SKUs are vital!
So to recap. Amazon is hard. Every single moving part of it is hard, even for experienced professionals. I guess that is part of the challenge and the attraction though. Constant learning is never a bad thing. But was there a time when selling on Amazon was less difficult than it is today? Perhaps a little bit. If I ever get my flat file working I'll let you know.
Comments
Post a Comment