UPC Codes and Amazon Feed

[jdarby]

Forgive me if this has been added in a newer version or if I've just completely overlooked it..

I'm using 7.0.7 and am looking at the possibility of uploading products to Amazon for listing on their site through product Feeds. Currently, I only have Google, Yahoo and Shopping.com as options, has Amazon been added in a newer version?

One of the key pieces of information that Amazon relies on is a UPC code for product listings, but in 7.0.7, there isn't a field that is specifically labeled as UPC, has that been addressed?

[david-ebt]

There is currently not a specific feed for Amazon included with AbleCommerce.

You can use a feature like the product template fields to hold the UPC Code. See this post:

viewtopic.php?f=44&t=13921&p=59805&hili ... de+#p59805

[jdarby]

There is currently not a specific feed for Amazon included with AbleCommerce.

You can use a feature like the product template fields to hold the UPC Code. See this post:

viewtopic.php?f=44&t=13921&p=59805&hili ... de+#p59805

Thanks, David.

I'll have to compare the existing product feed outputs and see if they are anything near what Amazon is looking for. I'll also take a look at the Product Template feature, I'm not sure it's something I've ever looked at, thanks for that tip.

[david-ebt]

Product Custom Fields are another option for fields like UPC that you'll probably have for most of your products. Here's a good post that describes adding a customer field to the admin and to your site.

viewtopic.php?f=47&t=12056&p=68630&hili ... tes#p68630

[jdarby]

I just took a quick look at the product feed output files and 2 of them already have columns for "UPC", but they're blank on both of mine, do you happen to know where this data should be coming from?

[david-ebt]

It looks like the Google and Shopping.com export a column for UPC. It also looks like the code takes a look at your product SKU and if it looks like a UPC (12 digits), then it will export in the UPC column. You can see an example of this in the Able wiki for creating a customer feed.

http://wiki.ablecommerce.com/index.php/ ... d_Provider

[frankenstein897]

I am interested in this as well. jdarby, what did you end up doing?

[jdarby]

I am interested in this as well. jdarby, what did you end up doing?

Nothing yet, we're still tackling this issue and prepping our products to comply with what Amazon needs for product listings, but it appears that the Google product feed output can be adapted to drop the data into Amazon's Seller spreadsheets, even if you have to copy and paste the data from one spreadsheet to another. The columns should all match up and the minimum amount of data is there, I believe. Working on a few other projects ahead of this one, but I'll be coming back to this one soon enough.

[frankenstein897]

Thanks for the update. Looks like we are going to start selling on Amazon now too so we will be on this too. The problem we have is that not all of our products have UPC codes. So, we need to tackle that issue as well.

[frankenstein897]

Got the UPC thing taken care. But, the description isn't being populated in the feed. Has anyone seen this?

Thanks,
Chris

[merance]

What did you do for gridded items UPC's? and gridded items in general? I'm using W2M feed but it only supports one UPC field per item which really isn't correct on a gridded item (such as a shirt that comes in sizes/colors?) I too want to use it for Amazon but this UPC thing is a problem. The out of the box google feed from Able doesn't even include the variants...

[frankenstein897]

I don't do that. I have a seperate product for every color. Mainly because reporting is limited when you start having attributes, etc. sorry.

[jmestep]

the description isn't being populated in the feed

I haven't checked out the recent builds of Able, but older builds populated the description with the product summary field.

[batmike]

For our store, I repurposed the Cost of Goods Sold field that is available for each variant (every size/color combination, for example). By using that, I was able to export the data correctly for my variant based feeds - Google & Amazon in particular.

The reports in AbleCommerce get screwed up because they reflect the COGS which are now millions of dollars (or UPC codes ). To correct this, I modified the source code to calculate all COGS reporting from the base product level Cost, but this isn't really necessary unless you rely on the reporting from AbleCommerce.

Anyway, that's how I found a way to have variant-level UPCs. Hope that helps.


-Mike

[merance]

Mike - that's thinking out of the box!!!! Are you using W2M's google feed generator?

[batmike]

No, I started out using Joe Payne's feed builder, which I don't think is being sold anymore, but have modified the code too much for it to look like the original anymore. The Amazon and Google feeds are built around that, but obviously quite a bit more customized to deal with the variants and the specific requirements of those places. There's a couple other things with our setup that made me do this or that with it but that's the basic framework and it's worked very well (a lot better than filling in text templates!).

[jmestep]

Just a note on the W2M feed:
It is written so that it can be customized by a merchant or we can customize it. We did that because different merchants want different things and for merance, we are going to customize it so that it pulls the UPC from the variant sku field.