Salestio guide: Create new Amazon listings with variations

Salestio offers plenty of tools for listing products on Amazon. In today’s article, we will focus on the specifics of using variations when creating new Amazon products.

The first step in sending the items from the store to Amazon is to create a Selling List in Salestio. The Selling List will hold the items that we are sending and offer a way to track sync status, run manual updates, or investigate the logs.

Go to Salestio > Selling Lists tab and click “Add Selling List”. Select a connected Amazon account and marketplace. The rest of the settings can be left at default, or you can edit them to use the profiles created earlier.
Learn more in Salestio docs: Create New Selling List [Amazon]

After the Selling List is created, add products to it by clicking “Add products” at the top. Give the app a minute, and the selected items will appear.

To send the items, select them in the Selling List and run the “Send to Amazon” action. This operation has to be confirmed by Amazon, so check back in 10-20 minutes to see the results. The status will change to “Linked” if the item is successfully listed.

In some cases, an error may appear (indicated by a “Linking Error” status instead of “Linked”). Click on the Logs button to check it out.

Valid product identification was not provided

The above message may appear when the barcode for the item is incorrect or missing. To fix this, check the Barcode field on the store’s product page. Make sure that the code matches the existing product in the Amazon catalog and try sending the item again.

Missing Attributes product_type. SKU example-product doesn't match any ASINs. Make sure that all standard product ids (such as UPC, ISBN, EAN, or JAN codes) are correct. To create a new ASIN, include the following attributes: product_type.

This error may appear when the item does not yet exist in the Amazon catalog, and product creation is not enabled in Salestio. Keep reading to learn more about configuring product creation for items with variations and create brand-new product pages on Amazon.

More solutions to various errors:
List on Amazon: Common errors and how to fix them

Adding a Creation Profile

A Creation Profile is necessary to send products that do not yet exist in the Amazon catalog. This profile allows specifying the target Amazon category and product type, configuring variations, and item specifics like size, country of origin, materials, etc.

To start setting it up, go to Salestio > Profiles > Creation Profiles and click “Add creation profile”. Pick a profile name and the target Amazon marketplace. To save a Creation Profile, add at least one mapping. A mapping contains a link between a product group in the store (category, product type, or Shopify Collection) and the Amazon details (category, product type, and item specifics).

Select the product group in the “Condition” section. When you send a product from the Selling List, it will be matched against the condition here. Below, select the target Amazon category and product type. Matched items will be listed in the selected category.

We will be listing a dog hoodie, so the example settings will look like this:

After the Amazon product type is selected, the corresponding product specifics fields will appear below. Usually, there is no need to fill out every field, but the required fields depend on the selected product type At least one Bullet Point is always required. In our case, “Apparel” has the following required fields:

Model Number, Model Name, Manufacturer, Offering Condition Type, Lifestyle, Style, Target Gender, Age Range Description, Material, Fabric Type, Color, Size, Manufacturer Contact Information, Closure Type, Country of Origin, Dangerous Goods Regulations.

Keep in mind that the required field can be different depending on the selected Amazon marketplace.

Setting up Variations in the Creation Profile

Shopify variations are based on a list of options. For example, you could add Color and Size as options. Salestio can use these options in the mapping to configure variations. Each option can have several attributes:

Size: XS, S, L, M.
Color: Black, White, Red.

For every combination of Size and Color, Shopify will create a corresponding SKU in the store which is called a variant.

To include variations in Amazon listings, enable the “Does this product have variations?” setting. Depending on the variants in the store, select the Variation Theme Name that applies. We will use “COLOR/SIZE” as our example. Please note that the variable fields have to be configured with a variation option from the store. For the “COLOR/SIZE” theme, we have to configure both “Color” and “Size” specifics. The format looks like this:

[product_attribute_value('StoreVariationOption')]

You can use autocomplete and select this value from the dropdown in each field.

For some product fields, Amazon expects a specific format. For example, “XS” is not accepted as a size value for hoodies and sellers should use “x_s” instead. You can check the possible options in the dropdown for any specific. Select any value to see how it appears in the field. This would be the required format:

Because sellers are unlikely to use “x_s” or “jaspo_2x_s” as variation names in their store, Salestio allows mapping variation names in the store to the format required by Amazon. To set this up, click the “Variation Mapping” button at the top of the specifics section. Add mapping lines for each store variation attribute:

With Conditions, Amazon category and product type, Variation Mapping, and the list of specifics, the mapping is complete. To save changes, click “Add Mapping” at the bottom of the page. If you have multiple product groups that require different settings, repeat the above process to add multiple mappings and save the Creation Profile.

Finalize product creation settings and send

When the Creation Profile is complete, it has to be selected inside of the Amazon Profile. Go to Salestio > Profiles > Amazon Profiles and select the one that is used in the Selling List. Enable the “Product Creation” checkbox, select the Creation Profile from the drop-down, and enable the “Allow variation” option.

With all profiles configured to create the listings, try sending the items again. Go to the Selling List, select the target items, and run the “Send to Amazon” action.

If you want to expand your Amazon store to multiple marketplaces, check out our guide for international sellers: Selling on multiple Amazon marketplaces.

Syncing your e-commerce store with Amazon through Salestio makes it easier to create Amazon listings in bulk. By following the above steps, you can ensure that the listings are organized and synced across the platforms. Get Salestio for your e-commerce platform of choice and start a Free 30-day Trial.