Looking to get started selling on Amazon? This guide contains the steps detailing how to configure your Amazon integration, how to get your products ready to go live, and how to test your order set-up.
Before proceeding, you need to make the connection between Sello and Amazon if you have not done so already, you'll find instructions in this guide.
Configuring Amazon
There are different settings you can configure for Amazon in Sello. These include the name of the channel in Sello, but also which standard shipping option should be used for your products.
The standard shipping option will automatically be used for all products unless you add a different shipping option on the product itself, so it is a good way to add the same shipping option on multiple products!
Getting your products ready
To go live on Amazon, you need to make sure your products meet Amazon's standards.
What do I need to add?
What Amazon requires you to include in your product data is decided by a lot of different variables, which makes it hard to include all of it in this guide.
However when you are editing a product for Amazon, you will notice that the detail page starts loading, and will after a few seconds be refreshed with more mandatory attributes. This is because each attribute may include more mandatory attributes, and Sello will validate this for you as you are editing the product. When the page stops loading and no more mandatory attributes show up, you have added every mandatory detail.
What can I add?
The information you can add is determined by the category you have selected for each product, and some attributes are not able to be added to some categories.
To make sure you are only adding information that is allowed for your selected category, add only attributes that are visible on the detail page for the product.
How do I add the information?
You can enrich your products either one by one, in bulk, with quick edit or with excel.
Amazon's basic product requirements
Below you will find a list of Amazon's basic requirements.
Categories
Amazon has unique categories for each country, this means that you need to set a category for each country you are going to be selling on, and you can not use the same category ID for each country.
You can find each category ID, for each country, here.
Attributes
Amazon has multiple mandatory attributes that each product will need in order to go live. They will all be visible on the detail page when you edit the products, and we have included the most common mandatory attributes below:
- EAN / GTIN
- Brand
- Color
- Size
- Country of Origin
- Dangerous Goods Regulations
Brand is an important attribute to keep in mind, as it will be required for all products. When you are getting started on Amazon, or listing new products, you need to contact Amazon and apply to sell the brands of your products.
Amazon needs to accept every brand you are going to sell, or you will receive errors in Sello. Make sure all of your brands have been accepted on Amazon before you activate your products!
Description
Amazon has guidelines you need to follow when you write your description, you can read more about them here.
Some of the common information that is not allowed in the description, title or bullet-points has been summarized below:
- No information about awards
- No information about warranty
- No promotions
- No links
- Do not include prices, shipping or other merchant specific data
- Special HTML formatting is not allowed
Amazon also has bullet-points as a requirement, which means you will need to add bullet-points for all of your products. If you do not already have bullet-points on your products, you can use Sello's AI tool to generate bullet-points for all products. You can read more about Sello's AI tool here.
Shipping options
It is mandatory to select a shipping option to be sent to Amazon for the products. You can select a shipping option by editing the product, going to the Shipping tab, and then selecting a Freight class for each Amazon country.
The Freight classes you see in Sello are picked up from your Amazon store front, which means you need to create the different shipping options in Amazon before they will be visible in Sello.
You can add a shipping option that will automatically be used for all products by going to your Amazon settings in Sello, this means that option will be used for all products unless you add a different shipping option by editing the product.
Prices
There are 3 different price fields for Amazon in Sello:
-
Price
The price we send to Amazon, this will be the purchase price for customers as long as you do not have a campaign. -
Campaign
The campaign price we send to Amazon, has to be lower than price and is added by the campaign tool in Sello. -
Recommended Retail Price
The RRP price, it will not be visible to customers but it is required by Amazon.
You do not need to add a price to all of these fields for the product to go live, but adding a price in each field could increase your visibility on Amazon.
If you have Calculate price enabled for the product, you will need to add the prices in the top price fields instead of the fields on the Amazon tab. The fields do not have the same name at the top as they do on the Amazon tab, you can find an explanation on which field gets transfered to which below:
- Price (Top field) -> Campaign (Amazon tab)
- Industry price (Top field) -> Price (Amazon tab)
Matching products
If the products in your inventory already are being sold on Amazon by other retailers, you will be able to match them to your own inventory. When a product is matched, you will not need to add as many mandatory attributes in Sello, and Sello will only send the price and stock levels for the product to Amazon.
If you wish to edit a matched product on Amazon, you will need to add the attribute Amazon_FullASIN to the products, as this will signal Sello to always sync all information on the product instead of only prices and stock levels.
You can import this attribute with excel by following the below steps:
- Create an excel file with your products
- Name a column in the file: Property Amazon_FullAsin
- Fill the cells of that column with: true
- Import the file to Sello
- Done! All of the products in the file will now have all of their data sent to Amazon.
Keep in mind that this does not guarantee that Amazon will update the products with your new information, especially if your products have been matched to existing products. Contact Amazon if you need to edit your matched products.
Activating products
To make Sello push a product to Amazon, it needs to be activated for the Amazon country you are connected to. If you are connected to multiple countries, you need to activate the product for each country you are going to sell it on.
You can activate the product by clicking on Edit and going to the General tab, then click on the country you wish to activate the product on.
It is also possible to activate multiple products with excel, you can read more about different ways to activate products here.
Common problems
When your products are active and you have filled in all mandatory fields in Sello, the product will be sent to Amazon, where Amazon will validate each product both automatically and manually.
In this stage, you may notice errors from Amazon in Sello that say certain attributes are invalid and need to be changed, that attributes are missing, or that the brand is not allowed.
Invalid or missing attribute
The fields that have received an error will be highlighted in red in Sello, so you can easily adjust the problem. However in some cases, the field may not be highlighted red. This could mean that there is already a valid value added to the field, but Amazon means that for this product this specific value is not valid. If you have questions regarding the errors, contact Amazon and they will clarify. If you are not able to find the field in Sello, contact our support.
Invalid brand
If you are receiving an error saying that the brand is invalid, it means that brand had not been registered for you when we tried sending the product to Amazon. You will need to contact Amazon to register the brand, and when it has been registered all products with that brand need to be "re-sent" from Sello. This does not happen automatically, you can trigger the products to be re-sent to Amazon by simply updating them, or contact our support.
I'm live, now what?
When the products have been accepted by Amazon with no errors, you will officially go live, congratulations! 🎉
If there are still products in your inventory that have not gone live or are not blocked yet, you can keep working on enriching them as usual, and follow the previous steps to push brand new products live as well.