Amazon FBA FlatFile Data Backup Skipping – A Risk No Seller Should Take


If you haven’t had an Amazon emergency happen to your account, count yourself lucky. But don’t count yourself risk-free. Emergencies can come out of nowhere and wipe your listings. Don’t believe us?

We’ve seen dozens of emergencies—ranging from account hacks to Amazon delistings to suppliers shutting down.

Some emergencies can be especially painful for sellers that have dozens or hundreds of listings. Imagine them all going down. Pretty doomsday scenario though right? Maybe. But we’d still rather be safe than sorry. Wouldn’t you?

How long would it take you to get everything back up as it was?

If the answer is above is more than a few minutes (an hour, max), you’re doing it wrong. You should be able to get listings back up right away.

You need to get your inventory into a Amazon flat file data backup using our template. Not having this puts your business at a risk you cannot afford.

It could leave cash on the table or your brand at risk of losing repeat or consistent customers.

Get your listings in order and get them in a back-up. Save yourself from having to face these circumstances.

How do you do it?

Follow these steps.

Inventory Listings

Let’s start with the basics.

Amazon offers two methods for listing your products: Add a Product and inventory file templates.

  1. 1
    Add a Product – Interactive listing tool that guides you through the process of adding and maintaining your inventory.
  • Ideal for adding one listing at a time
  • Available to all sellers
  • Available for listing in the product categories listed under Requirements & Restrictions
  1. 2
    Inventory File Template – Tab-delimited text files that include the necessary information to list your products
  • Ideal for adding multiple listings at one time and listing more than 100 products
  • Available to sellers on the Professional selling plan
  • Easily editable in Excel
  • Can be used to list and add products
  • Customized templates for each product category

How to Add Product Using Inventory File Template

We recommend everyone use an Inventory (“Flat”) File Template and Back-up system. While the ‘Add A Product’ feature makes it easy to get things uploaded, it means there’s no hard copy or record of your listings. If Amazon decides to shut you out, you may never recover that information.

Also, you want to add multiple product listings at the same time, you can do so using inventory file templates. This template is a tab-delimited text file (.txt) that include all of the information that you need to list your products on Amazon.

What Do I Need To Do Before Using Inventory Files?

You’ll need a few things ready to make your inventory file before you upload it to list your products. Here’s what you’ll need to get ready:

  • Excel or any other spreadsheet program
  • Identify the product category for your products
  • Request approval (if necessary) to sell in specific product categories
  • Match your products to the Amazon catalog. Amazon creates listings for your products based on information you include in your file in this order
  • Match ISBN, UPC, or EAN: If your file includes a product identifier (ISBN, UPC or EAN) for any product and a matching identifier exists on Amazon, we will attempt to find a match for your product using the information you provide.
  • Match manufacturer or biographical information: If your file does not include ISBN, UPC or EAN identifiers for a particular product, we will attempt to match based on manufacturer or bibliographic information you’ve submitted in your file. An exact match is required to create a listing.
  • Create new listings: If we cannot find matches to our existing catalog using product identifiers or manufacturer or biographical information, and you provide enough data in the upload file, we will create new product pages for listings with enough provided data.

Once you’ve made this, you’ll upload your file. Your inventory will then reflect on these pages to create offerings for buyers. If there is insufficient information to match to existing pages or create new pages, you will receive an error message in the processing report following your upload.


Interesting: The Buyer-Seller Fit

How To Add Your Inventory File Into Amazon

We built an entire SOP around how to upload and maintain your inventory file. We’re giving that SOP away for free here!

And not just that this SOP, but we’re adding in TEN more SOPs on what we think EVERY Amazon seller needs to be using. These are the SOPs we use in our Foundation ‘Done With You’ Package where we help Amazon sellers set up the organizational necessities they’ll need to scale, grow, become more profitable, or sell their business.

Get our step by step guide to Inventory File uploads and back-ups here, along with the other SOPs.

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