When mapping your Amazon template, strategy and planning should be taken into account. If you have instances in which more than one value is needed for any particular template field or more than one inventory field should be referenced, a business rule is a great solution.

Today, we’ll cover the most commonly used business rules and their template fields.

Product ID and Product ID Type

The Product ID field maps to the unique ID that you are using to list your products to Amazon.

  • Send UPCs (US sellers) or EANs (UK, French and German sellers) or JAN (Japanese sellers)
  • UPCs, EANs and JANs are constant and cannot change. In most cases, Amazon will require that the listing has a UPC or EAN. In some cases, an exception can be obtained via the Amazon Brand Registry program or by applying directly to Amazon.
  • Avoid sending ASINs
  • ASINs are owned by Amazon and can change at any time.

First, we’ll create our Product ID rule. Let’s say, for example, your account has ID values in the UPC, EAN and the ASIN fields. And you wish to use them in that order. We’ll build our Product ID rule in the following format:

IFBLANK($itemUPC,$itemEAN,$itemASIN)

The IFBLANK will allow us to check up to eight fields and return the first non-blank field. It is important to note the order of the rule, this is how it will check the fields. For example, iIf UPC is your preferred product ID, it should be first.

Now, for our Product ID Type rule, we simply need to send the type of ID we already mapped in the Product ID rule. It’s important to ensure the order of the fields is exactly the same so the value and type match up for Amazon to validate on their end.

In order to match the Product ID rule, the Product ID Type rule is very similar:

SELECTCASE(NOT(ISBLANK($itemUPC)), “UPC”,

NOT(ISBLANK($itemEAN)),”EAN”,

NOT(ISBLANK($itemASIN)),”ASIN”,””)

What this rule does is check if the UPC field is blank. If it’s not, it will send the text “UPC” as the product ID type. If the UPC is blank, it then goes on to check the EAN field, and if it exists, it will send text “EAN.” If that field is blank, it will check the ASIN field next and send the text “ASIN” if the field contains a value. Finally, if all three fields are blank, it will send nothing.

Feature Bullets as Your Description

Feature Bullets function as brief descriptive text or product highlights which are not covered by the specific attribute values.

  • Create five attributes in your inventory labeled AMZFeatured Bullet 1 – 5
  • Populate with well-written descriptive text (utilize 500 character limit/bullet)
  • Map to all five Featured Bullet fields using attributes
  • Certain electronics categories can include additional bulleted technical details. While the first five bullets have their own fields in the template, to include the additional bullet points you need to use the Additional Features field. To format this field as bullets, you need to use the following conventions where the “value1”, “value2” (and continuing) text would be replaced by your bullet text: nv: ^value1 | ^value2 | ^value3 | ^valueX

To lessen the amount of work needed to prepare your Amazon feed, one option is to utilize existing Featured Bullet fields as your description. To do this, we will use a business rule to join the five fields together and meet the requirements of the Description field.

The easiest way to combine AMZFeaturedBullet fields is with a JOINNB rule. The rule should use a comma delimiter.

Here is an example:

  • JOINNB(“,”,$AMZFeaturedBullet1,$AMZFeaturedBullet3,$AMZFeaturedBullet3,
    $AMZFeaturedBullet4,$AMZFeaturedBullet5)

The JOINNB expression allows us to join all five Feature Bullet fields into one paragraph, separated by commas. If your bullet fields are long and risk going over the 2000 character limit, you may want to build in a safeguard within your business rule. A simple addition to the rule will allow us to limit the rule to 2000 characters, without including extra commas if the fields are blank:

  • LEFTWORD(JOINNB(“,”,$AMZFeaturedBullet1,$AMZFeaturedBullet3,
    $AMZFeaturedBullet3,$AMZFeaturedBullet4,$AMZFeaturedBullet5)
    ,2000,” ”)

The LEFTWORD expression allows us to begin counting the characters within the field from the left and trim the space prior to 2000 characters, so no words are cut in half.

Utilizing business rules within the Amazon template fields will help cut down on additional work, and help avoid product errors. Business rules are an excellent tool to help properly convey your data to the marketplace when they exist in more than one field.