List Several Items for Sale at Once
If you’re ready to do serious business through Amazon, a Pro-Merchant subscription allows you to list hundreds or even thousands of items in one fell swoop.
Listing one or two books with Amazon’s standard listing form [Hack #49] is fine, but once you reach a dozen or so it can be tedious. Amazon has a tool called Book Loader that volume sellers can use to upload their entire inventory of books in a machine-readable format.
Tip
You need to be a Pro-Merchant subscriber Section 4.2 Section 4.2 to use this hack. Bulk upload tools are available only with a subscription.
The Book Loader is a specialized version of another bulk-listing tool that Amazon offers called Inventory Loader (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/1161312/). The Book Loader contains fields specific to books, such as author, publisher, and binding. The Inventory Loader format is more generic to handle a wide range of items.
The loading process involves entering all of your product data into a spreadsheet, saving it in a tab-delimited file, and sending it to the Amazon server. Unfortunately, populating the spreadsheet with all the required information can be just as tedious as listing the items individually.
Tip
If you’d like to see a sample Book Loader spreadsheet with all of the data fields available, send a blank email to bulk-template-request@amazon.com. You’ll quickly receive a reply with a blank Excel template attached.
Because we know that the final format Amazon needs ...