28 Oct‘21
There is an updated version of the Amazon product creation functionality. Check a new article by following this link.
As a Shopify store owner, at some point, you would probably want to extend your sales to Amazon. It is quite easy when your products are known to Amazon and exist in the Amazon catalog. But what if your products are totally new, and no one has ever sold on Amazon before? You would need to create a new listing on Amazon. Surely, you can do it on your Seller Central account directly. However, when you have dozens of products on Shopify, you might want to think of other ways to send new products to Amazon.
Salestio — Shopify Amazon Integration has been supporting creating new ASINs for quite a while. In this case study, we want to describe how our users resolve this task with the new Creation Profile form in Salestio and Shopify meta fields (optionally).
Challenge
The most challenging part when adding new products to the Amazon catalog is to add the information that is required by Amazon. The selling platform allows filling both optional and required fields. Depending on your goals, you might want to add as many details as possible. In other cases, you would want to add all details to the Description field. However, there are still some fields that you might not even expect that are required. It is important to find the balance between giving your buyers enough info and adding the data required by Amazon.
Solution
The Creation Profile in Salestio is what helps solve this challenge.
Here we will use 2 shirts as an example of the products that we want to send to Amazon. They both are in 4 variants in sizes but different colors.
Start by adding a new Creation Profile.
Note! If you sent your Shopify products to Amazon with Salestio previously, you will not be able to modify the existing Creation Profiles with the new form. In this case, you will need to add a new Creation Profile if you need to send other new products to Amazon.
Navigate to Salestio > Profiles > Creation Profiles, and click the Add button.
Give a name to your Profile, so you could recognize among the others, and select the marketplace where you want to send your products, and a number of images for each product (up to 9). We want to send the products to the UK marketplace.
The next step is to add Category mapping. You would probably want to send multiple products to Amazon, and not just Shirts. In this case, you should set a separate mapping for each group of products. In our example, we want to send just Shirts, so we create a mapping for Product Type > Shirt.
After you select the department and product type for the Amazon category, you will be presented with the list of fields. The first block is ‘Required fields’, look carefully at them and add what is relevant for your product type. If you are totally not sure what is required, you can skip adding any fields and just save the mapping and Creation Profile. After you send products without needed fields, Amazon will return errors. You will be able to fix the errors by editing the mapping in the Creation profile. Let’s see how it works.
In our case, what we definitely need is Variation in Sizes. So, we set Variation Theme as Size, and Variation Options as Product option: Size. It will take the data from the Size fields on product pages in Shopify.
Let’s save the mapping and creation profile with these data. Hit ‘Add mapping’ at the bottom, and ‘Create profile’ at the top. The newly added profile is displayed in the Creation Profiles list.
The next step is to set the correspondent Amazon profile. Go to Amazon Profiles, and add a new Profile. Here we should allow Product Creation and allow GTIN exemption as our products do not have EANs. If your products have variations, make sure to select ‘Allow variation’ as well. Otherwise, all variants will be sent to Amazon as separate products. Save the form.
After the needed profiles are set, go to the Selling List and click the ‘Add Selling List’ button. Add the needed data, make sure to select the Amazon profile that we just created. Our Selling List is in Product mode, so we can decide what products we want to send to Amazon. You can select the Collections mode if you want that all products from the selected collections to be added to the Selling List and sent to Amazon automatically.
The newly added products are displayed in the ‘Not Linked’ status. Select the products in the Selling List and click the ‘Send to Amazon’ button. Give Salestio about 15 mins and go back to check the results.
The status changed to ‘Linking Error’. As we expected, not all required fields were added, and Amazon returned errors. To view the error messages, click the Logs link next to the product in the Selling List.
Note! You can always be sure to add the Country of Origin field to the category mapping. It is required for all the products sold on Amazon.
To fix the errors, go back to the Creation Profile, find the needed mapping, click the ‘Edit’ button and fill in the details to the missing fields.
Quick Tip! There is a whole list of fields in the mapping, you can use Ctrl+F on PC, or CMD+F on Mac, to quickly find the needed field.
If the needed field is missing, make sure to expand the Optional fields.
After you add the data into the missing fields, make sure to click Update Mapping at the bottom of the fields list. This is how updated mapping looks in our case.
Make sure to save the modified Creation Profile.
We promised to show you how you can make use of Shopify metafields. And here it is. Let’s go back to our shirts. They are the same but the colors are different. Surely we would want to pass these data to Amazon not just in the product title but also as one of the product properties. There is a field in the mapping called Color Map. If you add the data to this field, it will enable the color filter on Amazon.
The thing is that you can select only one value for this field. And in our case, we have 2 colors for our Shirts. If you use this functionality as it is, you would need to create a separate Creation profile for each color you want to send. And what if you have even more than two colors that you want to add? Using metafields perfectly works in this case.
Metafields allow adding the custom fields to your product pages on Shopify. These fields are not visible for your Shopify buyers but they can be used internally by other apps that you installed in your store.
To add a new metafield, go to Settings > Metafields. At the moment, you can add metafields to the Product and Variants pages.
We will add a new metafield to the Products page. Add the name of the metafield, namespace and key will be added automatically. As we want to add ‘Color’, it most likely will be the single-line text field. So here is how the settings look in our example. Remember to save the form.
Now, next time you go to the Product page, you will find this metafield at the bottom of the page. Add the needed value to the field.
Important! If the needed field is a select list on Amazon, and as a result in the Creation Profile, make sure to add values that are relevant for this select list. For example, one of our shirts is in violet color, but there is no such option in the select list. There is an option ‘Purple’. It means that we should add ‘Purple’ to the newly created metafield.
Let’s go back to our Creation Profile and add this metafield to Color Map. Scroll down to the possible options in this field and find Color under the Product my_fields block. Select it, update the mapping and save the profile.
At this point all needed fields should be set, so let’s go back to our Selling List and try sending the shirts to Amazon one more time. Again, select the products and click ‘Send to Amazon’. Wait about 15 mins and check the status of the products in the Selling List.
In some cases, it might show Linking Errors again. It will show the list of different fields that are missing. The reason why not all the list is shown from the first time is that the further requirements depend on what was added before, and as nothing was added before the first send, it could not define what else fields will be needed.
And here we go. The products are linked, and they are added to your Seller Central account inventory.
Results
With the new Creation Profile form, you can send multiple products to Amazon at once. You might need to spend some time on the initial configuration. However, you will be able to use the same or updated settings every time you need to create new listings on Amazon.
Using built-in Shopify Metafields functionality allows you to extend the product information you send to Amazon without the necessity to send each group of products that share the same features separately.
Our support team is ready to help you with setting the needed configuration in the Creation Profile. We can even create an example mapping for you or schedule a demo to show how it would work exactly for your Shopify store and products. Contact us at support@salest.io or use a contact form in our help center.
You can find Salestio on the Shopify app store. The documentation page for various Salestio integrations is available at our help center.
Have any ideas or suggestions on what topic we should talk about next in our blog? Do not hesitate to let us know.
