Amazon SellerCentral

Amazon?s new merchant platform (also known as Seller Central) went live in November 2006. Most new merchants are assigned this seller platform. Existing customers are gradually being moved onto this platform.

Using this platform you can list existing products that Amazon sell (that you also want to) and also ones that they don?t. You need the barcode of the product, known as the EAN (or ISBN for books) if they don?t currently sell it. Amazon will create a new Amazon product for you (and assign it an ASIN (Amazon unique product code)). If someone else wants to sell the same product they would use this ASIN and be listed next to yours (and effectively compete with you, mainly on price).

Output Filename

Type in the name of the file to store the Amazon information to (including the directory). The file should end with txt, for example, amazon.txt. Once the feed file has been created this needs to be imported into Amazon (or sent to the relevant Amazon account manager). Details of this can be found when you sign up for an Amazon account.

Delivery Costs

Amazon now allows you to define your own shipping model. At the present time this has to be set-up in your Seller Central account. This has been provided here so that you can include these values in your feeds in your description or bullet points (or any other areas), if required.

The options in this section are used to define the possible shipping costs for each item. There are 3 main categories of delivery options.

                        Free Delivery
                        No additional amounts are added to the item?s price.

                        Fixed Price Charge
                        You always add this amount to each item?s price. You can enter a price at which the

             delivery is free.
                        Calculated Delivery Charge

The delivery charges are calculated using the settings that you specified within Actinic. You must select a single option for Calculate by, Zone, Class and any Free delivery.

If you wish to override these you can specify custom variables.

Products to Include
You can choose which products to include based upon a custom variable. This is very similar to the Exclude from Froogle Feed/Google Product Search Data Feed setting within Actinic.If you tick Check value before including you can choose a custom variable (clicking on the Set button) you are shown the following dialog:



You can then select the custom variable to use to determine if you want to include this product in the feed. You can set the default value to True (include in feed) or False (don't include in feed). This value will be used if a custom variable value has not been assigned to a product.

Note: When you create a custom value you should set its type to True/False.

Feed Type
Select the feed type for your products.  This is the Amazon category that you sell your products under.  Each feed type has a different set of properties.  If you sell over several different categories you can set up different properties for different categories and then exporting either in batch mode (specifying the feed type and filename as an option) or by manually mashing, changing the option and mashing again.

If you want to update you prices and stock levels, you can select the price and quantity feed type, this will export just the sku, price and quantity and so can be used to update details for products in several categories.

To find out more about using the product mash in batch, take a look at the batch and automation options here.

Properties

You can Add, Edit or Amend your property. When you Add or Edit a property the following dialog is displayed :

Variable

The property type can either be a standard Amazon type or you can specify your own.

NOTE : If you want to override the default values generated from your Actinic product details you can do this by supplying your own values (fixed or from a CustomVar). You can override the following values by selecting the relevant Standard Variable (in the Variable section). For example,  to use a different image for the product when displayed in Amazon (from your Actinic shop) you would select the main-image-url Variable. You would then define a fixed value or use a CustomVar to get the image to display (for example, http://www.ObeliskHoldings.TV/graphics/house3.gif).

title
Name of product. This defaults to the product name provided in Actinic.

description

Description of product. This defaults to the main product description defined in Actinic.

main-image-url

Image to use for the product. This defaults to the image defined in Actinic for the product.

item-price

Cost of the product. This defaults to the calculated price within Actinic.

sku

Unique identifier for the product. This defaults to the Actinic product reference.

Value

To have the same value for all of your products select the Use Text option. To have a different value for a shop section select Section under Type. To have a different value for each product select Product as Type. If Use CustomVar has been selected you should select a CustomVar (defined within Actinic and values assigned for each product) to retrieve the information from.

If you are using Actinic V8 you would create CustomVars by creating Variables in the Design Library. You would normally create these in the General Group. Also add in a Default value to use for the product. This will be used if a Custom Var hasn?t been used for a product.

Advanced features

If you want to use the values created by the Product Mash in different fields than the default ones you can use the following macros to substitute these values. For example, if you want the Actinic title as an Amazon search term you should define a fixed value for search-terms1 as !!title!!, as shown below :

There are more advanced ways to include information from Actinic (or from different fields). See the Advanced Features section for more details