Amazon Flat File Guide: Everything You Need To Know

Creating a new product listing on Amazon is easy if you just want to sell a single product, but it can get complicated to sell hundreds of products at once. Managing hundreds of individual listings can be extremely time-consuming and bring complexities to managing hundreds of products simultaneously, so Amazon introduces the flat-file feature to ease their sellers to manage and update their listings and their inventories in a relatively simple manner.

The flat file upload feature is a type of bulk upload. The flat file feature can be very useful for adding your entire inventories to Amazon in one go. It is a simple way to increase profits by using flat files to create and update your listings. The use of flat files can save you hours upon hours when it comes time to update your listings on Amazon. Using flat files also allows you to be more efficient in generating new product descriptions or titles and updating prices and shipping costs.

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What is Amazon Flat File and why do we use it?

Amazon Flat file is an Excel sheet provided by Amazon to enter bulk data, ranges from one listing to many listings.

We can conveniently add many details in our listing’s back-end in just one go using this flat file.

It is the fastest way to perform tasks in bulk. Whether you are adding or editing multiple listings, you don’t need to access every single listing and make a change which is also very time-consuming. You can use Flat file to do the lengthy work in a simple, easiest, and quickest way.

One of the best reasons to use this file is: you get feedback if there is something that went wrong during the process or if any errors or any changes you made that is not happening. If so, you will receive feedback explaining the reasons for the errors and why any problem exists.

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Downloading Flat file From Amazon Seller Central

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Log into your seller central account then go to the inventory tab. There you will see “Add product via upload”. Select this option as you may look in the below picture:

After selecting “Add products via upload” you will come to the following screen where you will have to go to the tab “Download an inventory file.”

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Right after this you will have to choose category as per your product:

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And after selecting the correct category you will have to select your marketplace and at the bottom select generate template:

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After selecting generate template your Excel file will be downloaded.

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What is in the Amazon Flat File?

The Excel file which you have just downloaded is your flat file of your product and for each category the file will be slightly different. You can open the downloaded file with MS Excel or through Google sheets.

There are seven sheets in a Flat file:

Instructions
Images
Data Definition
Template
Example
Valid values
Browse data

From the above sheets, only a template sheet is required to fill while the other sheets will help you out that how and what to enter in it.

You can fill the template sheet with the help of drop-down arrows available in cells, or you can also take help from the valid values sheet that what to select for which cell as per your category.

The template sheet is divided into 9 different parts which may vary upon your product category.

Required Product Information
Offer
Product Dimensions
Item Discovery
Image
Fullfilment
Variation
Compliance
Product enrichment

Once you have entered data in the required fields as per your product category choosing the right values for each cell then there is no need to go and enter data one by one in back-end you only put values save the file and upload it in Seller Central, it will automatically make all the necessary changes in your listings.

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Uploading Flat File

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Go to Amazon Seller Central, select inventory than go to option “Add product via upload” now this time you have to decide the second option which is “Upload your inventory file”. After selecting it choose “File type” (Inventory Files for specific category), then select the Excel file which you have saved for upload.

While uploading your file you can provide your email Id to let Amazon send you the notification about the status after it checks your file.

In the first step when you upload your file it will get checked by Amazon whether there are any errors in it or not Amazon will email you on our given email Id if either there are any changes required or not, it will be accepted if it is 100% correct.

Once your file is checked and confirmed that it is error-free and doesn’t require any changes now finally you can upload the file to execute the changes which you have made. You can also get notified about the upload status through email by Amazon.

Now whatever changes you have made in the back-end of your listings will be changed in one go of what you have made in the flat file. After it, you may also do cross-check that all the changes you have made in your listings are all done correctly.

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