Any way to change hundreds of listings at Amazon?

Selling on Amazon Listings and Variations
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Yesterday I made changes to several hundred of my listings in my data base. I upload to Amazon with a UIEE file, and so many changes caused the file to be too big to upload to them. My database is Abe’s Homebase, I don’t think I can select only some changed files to make several smaller files for uploading. Is there a way to select 100 at a time and change them in my inventory list at Amazon? It is the same change to all, lowering the price. I can do them individually, but it would likely take two weeks, getting some done each day between other tasks.

I can’t get to this until Tuesday, I know the forum isn’t too busy on a Sunday, so feel free to post suggestions for a couple of days, many thanks. I believe I have mentioned in the past my dislike and therefore lack of knowledge of computers and most things technical…so feel free to answer as if I was an eight year old. :smile:

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Are you an ABE seller? If so, raise the question on the ABE forum where there are more Homebase users. Not a heavily used forum, but you should get an answer.

You can use Manage Inventory to view up to 250 at a time and make the same change to all – but price change is not one of the options.

Upload file would definitely be better.

If your UIEE upload to Amazon is working, can you just manually edit that file – copy out a large portion, paste into a Notepad file and create a new smaller upload?

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I’ve been looking at this, and the general concensus sees to be that it is retiring, and being replaced by tab delimited.
( I’ve been hesitant to be an early adopter of anything on Amazon, so I’ve been waiting for the inevitable bugs to be worked out of it before I try it. )

Tab-delimited files can be loaded into a spreadsheet and easily manipulated there.

I’m sorry that I cannot say that this will work, merely that it should. ( IOW, you get to walk through the minefield first. I’ll follow, offfering advice :slight_smile: )

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I did think of posting the question at ABE, but then got too impatient to have it done. Once I got a rhythm going it wasn’t so bad. Turns out I changed over 900 in my data base, but only about 500 of those had ever made it to Amazon. The UIEE file is definitely not the preference (if I only knew then what I know now…) and I also found another 50 or so that had resisted earlier changes, so got those too.

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Yes, the dreaded end of the UIEE file. I expected it would get removed long ago, with Amazon twice not recognizing all the UIEE files uploaded over several weeks. And that was what, two or three years ago?? So I too expect the hammer to fall any minute. I tried switching data bases when Covid first kept us home, thought I’d have lots of time to learn it. It didn’t upload any more items than Homebase, just different ones :upside_down_face:

The words “spreadsheet” and “easily” do not work together in my world :grimacing:

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I do a lot with spreadsheets. They are my #1 tool for organizing information. There is a modest learning curve, but it is well worth your time, IMHO.

BTW, you do not have to use MS tools. You can get FREE open-source versions here.

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Thanks for that. Good to get free soft ware, as when the time comes, I will very likely pay someone to set it up for me. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I believe I did try tab delimited when the UIEE fiasco was under way, as Homebase allows you to choose the type of file to make. But I did not try to then put into a spreadsheet, I thought it could go as is, but it did not work for Amazon. @oneida_books looked at all of the files Homebase creates and didn’t find a fix at that time. So it sounds like spreadsheets are likely in my future.

I would gladly let you lead the way, I can cheer from the sidelines :wink:

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TXT or CSV files into excel are relatively painless with a small learning curve.

Screenshot 2025-02-02 13-25-25
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If you can download either TXT or CSV files and open them into excel, you could then download the Amazon price change template to input (copy) your items that are changing price. Save the price change template and then upload it to Amazon.

If we were doing “hundreds” of changes, we would do them in either groups by category or by groups of 100.

About 15 years ago, I was working as an operational manager in a call center and never had experience with excel. I started a pilot program using Microsoft Sharepoint which is an excel data management software. In less than two months, I went from learning to teaching others.

Once a person gets over the fear of using / breaking excel, it quickly becomes a go to program. To this day … if I want excel to do something but don’t know how to make it do it, I find a little research and playing around always yeilds a solution.

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Thank you Lost Marbles. I am bookmarking this post in anticipation of the dreaded day.

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I’m not afraid of breaking Excel. I’m afraid of accidentally changing my $100 items to $1 items and not finding out until I have 100 orders.

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… is the …

Did you know there is a way to set the cell to change colors if the value is less than let’s say $50 ?
… or what ever check value you would want … this would make your pricing fear mute.

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No. I don’t know about that.

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Pretty much everything that you could ever want to know how to do with Excel is one easy Google step away!

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@booknut7 … I recall our previous discussions on this in the ASF.

I find the easiest way is to:

  1. Open Excel First
  2. Import the file
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Yesterday while on the Canadian side of my account, I noticed that all of my changes to prices had not translated over from USA, so I spend an hour or so doing about 300-400 of them. This morning, GGGRRRR, almost none of the changes on either platform have stuck. I did 100 this morning on the Canadian platform and will wait to see if they happen before doing the rest. They normally will cross over with changes, they ARE the same SKU, so…? Though there are SKUs that will show up on one platform and not the other. My daily Amazon rant over, thank you.

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:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Finding the info is one thing.
Understanding the info is another.
Knowing when to use it is yet another.

We aren’t all supernerds! Well, not about spreadsheets, anyway… :grin:

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I married Mr. Spreadsheet. That’s probably why I refuse to learn how to use them, because I’ll never hear the end of it if I make a mistake — and he’ll know because he’ll be looking over my shoulder to make sure I do it, ummm, the way he taught me.

Which is why I stick to my own categories of supernerddom, stuff he’ll stay away from. :grin:

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In an interesting aside, I just ran across Glenn_Amazon’s 012925 post here:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/17ed899c-8362-45fb-b190-3f21a20b6e5b

As noted by several responders, all but the first, fifth, & sixth of the supplied links are currently inactive; in this excerpt of a 100622 post made to the OSFE I explained why that’s so:

In a later reply, once the inoperative URLs had been called out, Glenn made this 020425 post:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/17ed899c-8362-45fb-b190-3f21a20b6e5b?postId=4e75e07b-692c-4076-8a08-8d139b439ffa

As is noted in the first-posted reply to Glenn’s assertion, his embedded link is also n/l/a:

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions/t/17ed899c-8362-45fb-b190-3f21a20b6e5b?postId=222538f7-4b11-498f-b34a-1355a1845231

This would seem to be indicative of something that’s been speculated about for some time: that Amazonians who have access behind the Midway Authentication/Authorization Portal (link, SAS) see things which we peons cannot.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that the links to Book Loader on the still-extant “Text-File” version “Inventory file templates, style guides, and browse tree guides” SHC page (renamed ca. 2020 from the previous “Inventory file templates and BTG”) @ https: //sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/1641 are either inoperative, or now lead to an entirely-unrelated page…

It will soon enough be the fifth anniversary since the change in SHC (“Seller Help Content”) described above was made, but the bloated nature of Amazon’s Byzantinely-intricate bureaucratic infrastructure STILL produces directives to post utterly useless information by the FMT-CMT…

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At some point between the time I made the above-quoted 020725 post and today,* 112625, Amazon has eviscerated that SHC (“Seller Help Content”) page nearly entirely, removing the decades-old table of links (links that slowly deteriorated in performance, especially since the 2018 Help Consolidation Initiative began) to templates, application pages, BTGs (“Browse Tree Guides”), & Category Style Guides entirely:

As has long been my wont whenever I run across one of Amazon’s myriad changes to published policies, I took the time to engage the survey, voting “no,” and sending this nastygram:

Interestingly, the Canadian page - or @ least, its ‘external’ version - hasn’t (yet) suffered the same deprecations, although, it, too has several broken links:

https: //sellercentral.amazon.ca/help/hub/reference/external/1641

I plan to archive all of those BTGs & Style Guides, while they’re still available, & compare them to the latest ones we already have on hand…

*

The change is actually more recent than that; I personally last archived the page that date, but I see that our Logistics folks downloaded several latest-version BTGs, as p/o the quarterly CLR/RFR (“Category Listing Report”/“Reverse Feed Report”) routine this past July, and I myself had last visited the page for a similar type of examination only a few weeks before.

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