I already use WP-Lister for eBay – what should I know about WP-Lister for Amazon?

The way listing on Amazon works is almost entirely different from the way it works on eBay. The most important difference is the fact that on Amazon, all sellers submit their products to the same catalog and duplicates are to be avoided. If the product already exists on Amazon, your product will be matched to that existing listing – usually by ASIN or UPC.

This matching process can be done in WP-Lister, where you can click the magnifier icon to select and assign an existing product from Amazon – or it will be matched automatically by Amazon, which happens when you submit a product with a product ID (UPC or EAN) that already exists on Amazon.

What this means is that you generally need to provide less details about your product if it already exists on Amazon. Price, quantity and a UPC or ASIN are all that’s required – you can even list existing products without ever creating a listing profile. However, if you are going to list new products to the Amazon catalog, you will have to provide a lot more details to fulfill their requirements than you are used from eBay – and you will find that listing profiles in WP-Lister for Amazon don’t have much in common with the eBay version.

Another important difference is the fact that Amazon doesn’t provide an “instant” API to list products. Instead, a plugin like WP-Lister for Amazon can only submit so called  feed files to Amazon, which are then processed in a couple of minutes (or half an hour later). So WP-Lister has to wait until the feed has been processed to be able to fetch the processing results – only then it can let you know if there were any errors or warnings.

This lack of instant feedback requires some more patience when working with WP-Lister for Amazon – which can be hard when you are just starting to use it and it might take a few trial and error runs to get a listing profile set up correctly.

It should be noted that submitting inventory via feed files does have advantages when you have a huge number of products. Revising thousands of products in WP-Lister for eBay takes a very long time – while Amazon doesn’t take much longer to process a feed with 1000 products than one with 100 products.