Amazon Marketplace: Inventory File Processing Changes effective 10/29

[Kristijntje]

Inventory File Processing Changes

Starting the week of October 29, 2007, we will be correcting two problems related to the processing of your inventory files: quantity will be required to create a listing, and duplicate columns will no longer be accepted.

Quantity Will Be Required to Create a Listing

In the coming days, we are correcting a problem where an update with an empty quantity would cause the quantity to be accidentally set to 1.

Today, if you create a new listing using the Inventory Loader or Standard Book Loader feed and do not specify a quantity, the quantity is automatically set to 1. Unfortunately, if you leave the quantity blank in a subsequent update, the quantity is also set to 1 even if you have changed the quantity to another value via feeds or through Manage Your Listings.

With this change, when you create a listing, you must provide a quantity. If this is missing, the record will not be processed and this error will be returned:

    “A non-zero value is required in the ‘quantity’ column.  Please fix the error and resubmit.”

You can correct the problem by adding the missing quantity and re-submitting the feed.

After you have created a listing, you can omit quantity during an update to make changes to price, condition note and shipping options without affecting the quantity. Specifying a quantity of zero will close the listing.

Note that the UIEE feed, which does not include a quantity field, is not affected by this change.

Duplicate Columns Will No Longer Be Accepted

We are correcting a problem where feeds with duplicate columns were accepted. This could lead to ambiguous results if the duplicate columns contained different data.

If your feed contains a duplicate column, it will not be processed and this error message will be returned:         

    “Column [ x ] is repeated in the file.”

You can correct the problem by eliminating the duplicate column and re-submitting the feed.

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