Amazon Seller Support

Avoid stock-outs: Update your listing quantities

With the holiday rush behind us, now is a good time to review your Amazon.com listings and make sure the quantities reflect what you have available.

You can easily modify the quantities of your listings one at a time in the Manage Inventory section of your seller account. Just find the listing you want to update, enter the correct value in the Quantity column, and click the Save button.

If you are on the Professional selling plan and use feeds (inventory files) to upload your inventory, you can use a Price & Quantity file to modify listings in bulk. A Price & Quantity file is the smallest file format with the fastest processing time; the only data required are SKU, price, quantity, and lead time to ship.

For more information on how to use a Price & Quantity file, search on keywords "Price and Quantity" in seller Help.

Not on the Professional selling plan? Learn more about the benefits of selling professionally on Amazon.

Out of stock? Use a Price & Quantity file to update your inventory fast

If you are on the Professional selling plan, you may use feeds (inventory files) to upload your inventory to Amazon.com. Did you know that when you run out of stock of an item, you can use a simple Price & Quantity file to quickly modify the quantity of your listing?

A Price & Quantity file is the smallest file format with the fastest processing time. The only fields required in a Price & Quantity file are sku, price, quantity and leadtime-to-ship. When you’re temporarily out of stock of an item, just set the quantity for that SKU to zero and upload the file to Amazon. That’s it!

When you restock the product under the same SKU, you can use another Price & Quantity file to set the quantity to your on-hand quantity.

(We do not recommend deleting SKUs that are temporarily out of stock. You should use a product-specific feed to delete a SKU only if you do not plan to restock the item in the future.)

To download the Price & Quantity template, search on keywords "Price & Quantity" in Seller Help.

Not on the Professional selling plan? Learn more about the benefits of selling professionally on Amazon.

Pro sellers: Decrease feed processing time with Pricing and Inventory feeds

Attention Professional sellers who use inventory templates (feeds) to list on Amazon.com: When you only want to update the prices and quantities of your listings, you can use Pricing and Inventory feeds to speed up processing time.

To create a Pricing and Inventory feed, just eliminate from your feed any product data that typically does not change (particularly Product, Relationship and Image information). Then upload that feed to Amazon using the Upload tool in your seller account.

Below are the fields required for creation of Pricing and Inventory feeds:

• sku, item-price, currency – this will update just your price (you can also submit sale prices in this feed)
• sku, quantity, leadtime-to-ship – this will update your quantity; leadtime-to-ship must be included if the item does not have the default 1-2 day leadtime-to-ship

You can maintain a separate feed that contains full product data that you can upload when that data changes.

Sell more this holiday season with a Pro Merchant subscription

If you're an Amazon Marketplace Seller with a lot of inventory to sell during the holidays, you might want to consider upgrading to a Pro Merchant subscription. Here are just a few of the benefits you'll receive:

• Discounted selling
• Access to our volume listing and order management tools
• Ability to create product detail pages in Amazon's catalog
• Eligibility for Featured Merchant status
• Add an unlimited number of listings that never expire

Learn more about the benefits of selling on Amazon with a Pro Merchant subscription.

If you're wondering whether a Pro Merchant subscription is right for you, our tutorial can help. Watch as our fictional hero, Mike Seller, evaluates the features of a Pro Merchant subscription and walks through the process of deciding if he should upgrade his account.

Proceed to video  

Are you using Amazon Selling Coach yet?

Amazon Selling Coach offers suggestions to you as an Amazon seller. Based on your seller profile and the products you list, the coach makes personalized suggestions and provides links to more information.

For example, if you forgot to add a few important details to a lot of your listings, Amazon Selling Coach might provide a report to make it easier for you to find those listings that need more attention. As you know, customers often want plenty of specifics in order to make a buying decision.

Check the upper right corner of your seller account home page to see if the coach has any suggestions for you today.

What is a Concession?

Sellers can always issue partial or full refunds for order costs, but the Amazon system also allows sellers to compensate buyers for order issues as an alternative to or in addition to refunding order amounts. Buyer credits that exceed the order total are called concessions. There are situations where you may want to issue funds to the buyer beyond the cost of the item(s) and shipping amount. For example, if a buyer receives a defective item and you want to compensate them for return shipping along with the order refund, you could issue a concession.

Concessions can be issued as partial refunds, with partial refunds, or along with full refunds. There are limits on the total amount sellers may provide to buyers when they issue order refunds and concessions. An order refund can't exceed the total amount originally paid by the buyer; however, the amount allowed in concessions may exceed the total cost of the order itself. Amazon displays the concession maximum for each item in an order using a formula that calculates the higher of the following two numbers:

Limit 1: 50% of the sum of original buyer-paid shipping plus product price
Limit 2: Twice the original buyer-paid shipping, plus $10 plus $20

To issue a concession:

1. Log into your seller account.
2. Go to your orders section and bring up the details of the specific order you want to refund.
3. Click the "Refund order" button on the Order Details page.
4. Choose the tab that fits your refund: Full (which is the default page) or Partial Refund (which is a tab below the order number).
5. Use the pop-up menu to select the appropriate Reason for Refund. 
6. Enter the amount of the return shipping and/or other concession into the Amount to Refund box.
   You will receive a pop-up asking you to confirm the concession.
7. Add a memo to the buyer. 
   This is optional but highly recommended, allowing up to 255 characters.
8. Click the Submit Refund button.

Additional facts to note about concessions:

• It can take 15 minutes for the data to be updated in the order to reflect the refund in your seller account.
• Buyers will see a concession amount as a different entry than a partial or full refund on their payment statement.
• Concessions do not contribute to the refund percentage in your seller performance metrics. If one or more products in an order are fully refunded, then the order is counted as a refunded order and is included in your Refund Rate.

If you would like a more in-depth look at concessions, please access the Help section of your seller account and search for concessions.

Best Practices for Submitting Item Feeds

If you use feeds to update your product listings, there are a number of things you can do to decrease their processing time.

After the initial upload, you do not need to provide complete product information in your feed, unless you are updating all aspects of your existing listing. If you intend to update only your prices and quantities, your feed will process quicker if it doesn’t include any listing data you don’t wish to modify.

Feed data can be broken into four parts:

1. Price
2. Inventory and lead time to ship
3. Images
4. Product Data and Relationship Data
    (description, bullet points, category, etc.)

To create Pricing and Inventory feeds, eliminate from your feed any product data that typically does not change (particularly Product, Relationship and Image information). You can maintain a separate feed that contains full product data that you can upload when that data changes. Below are the fields required for creation of Pricing and Inventory feeds:

• sku, item-price, currency – this will update just your price (you can also submit sale prices in this feed)
• sku, quantity, leadtime-to-ship – this will updated your quantity; leadtime-to-ship must be included if the item does not have the default 1-2 day leadtime-to-ship