Uploading Bulk Product Listing to Marketplaces -

A Quick Guide to Bulk Product Listing on eBay, Amazon & Other Marketplaces

If you have thousands of products to sell and want to sell on multiple sites like eBay, Amazon, Sears, Rakuten etc and on your own website, uploading these products manually will take hundreds of hours and can become a potential reason for business failure.

Today, to help you manage product listing on these sites more smoothly a way that can save tons of hours, we are going to explore the two solutions that you can adapt to upload products in bulk on these marketplaces.

Here’s the quick guide for you to understand the key requirements of bulk product listing and tools you can use to do so.

First Thing First, Prepare Precise Product Data

Whether you want to upload products to your website or want to list on marketplaces sites like eBay or Amazon, you should have an XLS or CSV file in which you have all the data arranged in a very well-mannered way so you can use that data in future for uploading products in bulk.

Here’s the rough list of columns your file should have

Product SKU
Product identifier (UPC Codes, ISBN or EAN No.)
Product title
Price
Primary category
Product variations & its Price ( Color, size or any other variation)
Product images (for best practice, first upload the product images on your server and save image URL in the file so you can use it anywhere on the web)
Quantity/inventory

Above is just basic information that you should have in very precise format. The actual file required to upload bulk listing will have lots of additional columns and fields related to the specific marketplace you want to list.

But if you would have above data ready, it will become much easier for you to prepare the final file for bulk uploading.

Preparing CSV File that Specific Marketplace Accepts

Marketplaces like eBay and Amazon accept bulk uploading through certain CSV format prepared as per their guideline and format.

Along with the basic product columns I have mentioned above, you would require adding additional fields like category id ( eBay or Amazon category id in which you need to list product), store category id, listing type ( auction or fixed style), listing duration, listing end time and bunch of other values that are necessary to list product successfully on each marketplace.

So, with this method, you would require learning the supported file format and its technical specifications mentioned by marketplaces and then need to prepare CSV file inputting product data according to their guideline.
For eBay, you would get this information from File exchange instructions guide and for Amazon, you would get that info from seller central help pages.

Make sure you input all the data precisely in the file for each product else the products with a missing value or invalid value won’t get listed as you may have expected.

The downward of this method is, a person should require technical knowledge of marketplaces guideline and if he doesn’t, he needs to learn it from scratch before listing in bulk.

As this method is free, you won’t require paying to other third-party tools that I have explained in next point.

Use of third Party apps like Channel Advisor, Solid Commerce, Linnworks, M2E PRO

The most important benefit of using these third-party apps is, you would require preparing file only once and then you can export the data from original inventory file which you have uploaded for listing products on other marketplaces from single platforms.

These apps are very well known for a multi-channel system and you can utilize plenty of other features to perform bulk listing on the marketplaces.

The advantage comes with the price, each of them requires you to pay monthly subscription fees depending upon the no. of products you want to list for sale or Certain commission on final sales.

Final Conclusion

If you have limited products to sell, let’s say in between 100-200, instead of going through all the trouble in learning for bulk uploading, it is better to upload products manually or hire someone to do so.

If you have 1000+ products and your inventory can grow considerably, you should prefer bulk uploading methods and try to adopt one of the solutions mentioned above depending on your unique needs.

Whether you go for bulk uploading through CSV upload or with use of a third-party app, it is always good to learn the marketplace guideline and technical specification which is necessary to list your product successfully in your desired category.