Build the Keyword-to-Listing Brief

Outcome: Translate search intent into title, bullets, A+ content, image captions, backend keywords, and proof points.

What to do in this lesson

Watch: start with the lesson video.
Learn: use the summary and key points to capture the operating principle.
Do: complete the action steps against one real product, SKU, campaign, supplier, or workflow.
Submit: write one action card with owner, evidence, next step, risk, status, and review date.

Watch

Hosted on Google Drive.

Lesson summary

This lesson teaches the process of creating an initial product listing on Amazon Seller Central. It covers key steps like setting the barcode preference, choosing the correct product category, adding listing content (title, images, bullet points, description), and closing the listing to preserve the ‘honeymoon period’.

The lesson emphasizes the importance of waiting at least 3-5 days after creating a UPC before attempting to create the listing, to ensure the UPC is recognized by Amazon.

Key points

Set the FBA product barcode preference to ‘Amazon barcode’
Choose the appropriate product category for your item
Prepare all listing content (title, images, bullet points, description) before creating the listing
Wait a minimum of 3-5 days after creating your UPC before attempting to create the listing
After the listing is created, go in and ‘close’ the listing to preserve the ‘honeymoon period’

Action checklist

Set your FBA product barcode preference to ‘Amazon barcode’
Create your initial product listing in Seller Central
Close the newly created listing after it’s accepted

Full transcript

Open transcript

creating your initial product listing. In this video, I’m going to take you through using all the content you’ve already created to actually create your product listing inside your cell essential account, getting your all-important FN SKU. So there are several reasons we need to create our listing before our inventory arrives at Amazon. Firstly, we need an FN SKU for the product. Secondly, we need to trigger any potential hazmat review, and lastly, it also checks for any potential gator category or product restriction. So hazmat restriction issues. If your product is classed as hazmat, it means that Amazon will not permit that product to be sold using FBA because they won’t ship it, essentially because it’s considered dangerous. So adding your listing now will trigger any hazmat review that your product may incur, so you know what you need to prepare ahead of time. Hazmat is nothing to worry about, but it is better to trigger this now before your inventory is on the way, and in the vast majority of cases, when you see a hazmat warning, it is absolutely nothing to worry about, and more often than not, it will actually rectify itself. So critically important, make sure you have your GS1 UPC, and do not attempt to create your listing until a minimum of three days after you created your UPC, and actually we recommend waiting for five days. This is to make sure it is in the GS1 database, which Amazon will check before approving your listing, and also make sure you watch the purchasing your UPC video, if you have not already done so. So creating your product listing. In this video, we are just going to look at the mechanics of actually creating your listing. So you must have all your listing content ready. Failing to do so can lead to errors in the process, and while you will have time to correct any errors, there is no need to create completely unnecessary issues. You will be able to edit your listing after creating it, but the more you add now, the less the chance of having any issues. So make sure you have everything in the following checklist ready before you go ahead and start creating your listing. Your GS1 UPC, your title, your main image, your secondary images, your bullet points, and your description, and you should also have your keyword list. So let’s go to a celestial account and actually create a listing. Okay, so here we are at celestial and before we actually create our listing, there’s one setting that we need to go and change if you haven’t already done so. And to do that, I’m going to go up the top right and put my mouse over the settings icon. And then the one we’re looking for is full-filment by Amazon. So I’m just going to click on it. And then the one we’re interested in is if I scroll down is this one, the FBA product barcode preference. This should say Amazon barcode. If it doesn’t, click on the edit button, and it will probably by default be manufacturer barcode, change it to Amazon barcode, and then click update. This will help prevent a lot of issues for you later on. And the majority of times it also automatically populates this for you inside the listing. But to create our listing, we’re going to click on the three lines on the top left, we’re going to hover over catalog, and then we’re going to click on add products. The first thing we’re going to do is underneath the data box is we’re going to click on the I’m adding a product not sold on Amazon. The one you’re adding is unique. So you’re going to click on I’m adding a product not sold on Amazon. And here’s where we choose the category that our product is going to appear in. Now you should actually already know what your category is, and you can do this by going and looking at all the top-selling competitors you have. But alternatively, you can use the search bar here so you would type your product name in, the beginning of it, and it will give you ideas. Or you can actually use the browse options underneath. Now for the sake of this training, the product I’m using is a stainless steel taco holder, and it’s a pack of four. So I know it’s going to be under home and kitchen and kitchen and dining. And they actually also know there is a specific subcategory four taco holders. But to show you the process in the search box for a category I’m going to type stainless steel taco holder, which should be enough and then click on the search button. And it’s got three matching categories. And essentially you just want to choose the one that matches yours the best. Now if we look at the first two, they’re essentially the same thing. There’s just a slight difference in what they call the tree. In other words, the branches underneath. So you can see here it’s kitchen dining, dining and entertaining. Whereas this one’s kitchen and dining, food service equipment and supplies. So I am going to choose this one because I think it’s the most applicable because the taco holders are all about dining and entertaining. Whereas this looks more like it might be industrial, even though it’s not in the industrial category. And you see this one underneath industrial and scientific. Again, it’s food service and equipment supplies, which makes it like this one, which is not strictly speaking what our product is for, our products for the home. So I’m going to click on select. Now, as I said, I could have scrolled down and gone through a home and kitchen by clicking on the arrow and then it shows me all the subcategories and then start digging through it. So it would be kitchen and dining next and so on. But if a good category appears here and it seems to be the same when your competitors are in, go ahead and select it. So I’m going to select it. And now things are going to start happening. This is where we start needing to add our content. And what I recommend you do is you actually create a Google dog to put all of the content in. So you have it ready to hand. I’ve actually done this. You’ve probably seen it already up in the top. And I’ve got the title, the bullet points, the description. Bear in mind, I just threw this together. This is not following the Scaler-OS way. It’s not following all the videos you’ve watched prior to watching this one. It’s just as an example to show you where everything goes. Now, when it comes to the title, you can put the entire title in if you wish. But what we actually recommend is you put in the main keyword. The reason for this, it helps set up the URL so that it appears on Amazon as Amazon.com blah, blah, blah, forward slash tackle holder stainless steel or something on those lines. Because if you put the whole title in, it could grab any part of this section that it feels is the right part to add to your URL. And that’s actually called your canonical URL. It’s not something you need to worry about too much. But all I would say is when you first initially create your listing, just put the main name of the product. So mine is tackle holder stainless steel set of four. So I’m going to copy it. I’m going to come up here. And the item name, it depends what category you’re in. It’ll either say item name or potentially title. But this is what we’re looking for. You can see it gives you the example of Deedis Blue Sneakers. So I’m going to paste that in. And we’ve done step one. One other thing, I didn’t mention the variations. Does this product have variations? The likelihood is you’re not launching more than one variation at once. So it would be no. You can change this later. Now the all important brand name. So from the previous video, you know that I’ve chosen kitchen Nova. So I’m going to type that in. Now I’m going to tell you right now there’s potentially I’m going to get an error message here because I haven’t waited at least three days since I created my UPC. But we’re just going to see what happens. So so far so good it’s sitting there. Now we need to add our ID. And this is our UPC. So before I go and grab the number, I’m going to click on select. And I’m going to choose UPC. And then I’m going to put the UPC, which is basically if you remember from the previous lesson, your G1012. So I’m just going to go and pause the video and grab that. All right. So I’ve grabbed the number. I’m going to paste it in. And then we’re going to find out if this has worked. And I’m just going to click on continue. Okay. So so far so good. It appears to have accepted the brand name. But we’re not going to know for sure until we get to the end. So now I’m going to put in the product description. Now the product description I’ve just put in here. You can see it is really simple. I’ve got no HTML in there or anything. It’s just a placeholder so you can see where it goes. So I pasted that in. And then we’re going to add the bullet points. You can see it’s all pretty self explanatory. So I’m going to grab the first bullet point. And then I’m click on add more because I’m going to add actually all five of them right now. So I need to grab the second one. And I just pause the video and add the rest. Okay. So I’ve now added the bullet points. Now you need to add content to every box that comes up on the page that is surrounded in red. So you see I’ve got four more to do here. The first one I’m going to do is the manufacturer because it’s exactly the same as your brand name. Remember, you are the manufacturer of your own product. It doesn’t matter where you got it from. You are the manufacturer. Okay. It’s Nova Kitchen. Probably should have called it Nova Kitchen. But anyway, now the item type name. This is something fairly recent. It’s not that critically important, but I’m just going to put tackle holders because we have our full title already created. And you can always go back and check up here at the top in the tabs. If I click on product identity, you’ll see there my item name and it’s provided title. You see that. We started off with tackle holder stainless steel set of four. It might not let us stick with that because it might not be unique enough, but as I said, we want to try and grab that canonical URL. But let’s go back to vital info. Model number, a model name. As the manufacturer, you can make up these numbers. You don’t use any number that came from your supplier. It’s your choice. So model number, I’m just going to put KN for Kitchen Nova and then TH for tackle holder and then a load of zeros and a one. Totally up to you how you do this. For this first product, it’s not that critical moving forward when you start adding lots of skews. In other words, lots of products. You might want to come up with a simple naming strategy for all your products. But for now, I’m just going to put that in. And the model name, I’m just going to call it tackle holders for. So we’ve completed this tab. We’ve got no more red boxes. So I’m going to click on offer. This first one, it’s unnecessary. You can see it’s not in red. Quantity. This is the number of products the customer will get if it orders. Now we’ve discussed. This is a set of four, but four is not the quantity. If they buy this, they will get one pack of tackle holders. So the quantity is one. Now, if I was doing some kind of bundle where they would get two packs of a set of four, then it would be two. And as always, you can always put your mouse over the question mark and it’ll tell you what it’s looking for. Now the price, how about we put 2499? Obviously, you should have worked out your price going from the previous videos, but I’m just going to put 2499 in for now. Offering condition type, really simple. Again, put your mouse over if you need to, but the answer is new. And this is a drop down. It’s not something you enter. Make sure you put new. And then finally, the fulfillment channel, we’re using FBA fulfilled by Amazon. So it’s the second one. Just check it and there you go. And you get this nice little message underneath telling you of how it’s going to work. Now, for marketplaces, at this point, I’m only going to fill in the United States because I’m not interested in selling in Canada or Mexico. This is something you can change later, but for now, that’s all I want. Just something else to point out. If you click on save and finish now, I’m not going to do it. It’s not going to let me because you see all of these tabs up here that have a red mark. We need to fill them out. So I’m going to click on product details and you need to go through this and fill out as much of this information that you can. So the material. So you can see here, it’s giving me options. If I scroll down, I can just put stainless steel. There’s also different grades of stainless steel. Now I don’t actually know what mine is because it’s imaginary. I’m going to scroll down. I’m just going to select stainless steel. Okay, so number of items. I’m not sure why it’s asking for this again, but again, this is how many actual units are they going to get. So in my case, it’s one. They’re getting one set of four. So I’m just going to put one in there. The color, it’s pretty much no relevant to tribute, but I’m just going to put in chrome. You can actually bypass this if the color is not important. Size. Again, I would actually say this is a relevant for my product because it’s not like they come in small, medium and large. So if I put my mouse cursor over the question mark, I can just select a relevant attribute. Now at this point, I’m not sure if it’s going to allow me to continue even though I’ve put that. So I’m going to leave it as blank if it makes me choose something. I’ll find out when I click on save and finish. Number of pieces. So mine is actually four because there are four pieces inside the package they’re going to get, even though it’s a set of four. So it’s one set of four pieces. So I’m going to put four. Collection name. There’s no collection for this. This I imagine would apply more to clothing or something along those lines. So again, I’m going to put my mouse cursor over the question mark and select a relevant attribute. And again, we’ll find out if I have to put something nonsensical in there to get this to move forward. Now my product is dishwasher safe. So I can include that. Included components. Again, it doesn’t really have any components. So I’m going to select a relevant. Is it fragile? No, it’s made of steel. And the number of sets is one. So as you can see, we’ve so got three that I’ve got a red box around it. So we may actually need to fill that in. So we don’t have a variation. So I don’t even need to click on this tab and it’s not marked in red. Safety and compliance. So country of origin. The country of origin is China. You do have to fill this in. Our batteries required. The answer is no. Obviously, if it’s yes, you would you would click yes. Dangerous goods regulations. Can I click on it? And I’m going to select not applicable because it’s not a dangerous good of any description. Contains liquid contents. The answer is no. And mandatory cautionary statement. No warning applicable. Okay, so we’re going to do images last, but I’m going to click on shipping. And now it’s asking for the package dimensions. And this is the dimensions of your product inside its package. So in my example, I have four attacker holders, but they will be inside a box. So what they’re asking for is the size of that box. So I’m going to pause the video and fill all this out. Okay, so fill these out. So you can see I’ve put item package length. Remember, it’s the package, not the actual product. I’ve put eight and in the drop down, I selected inches. And the width is four inches. The item package is two inches and the package weight 1.48 pounds. The last one is the number of boxes and the answer is one because it’s one box. And you’ll notice when I put the one in here that this tab will actually disappear and click outside it and it’s gone. If you’ve made a mistake and you need to change this to get back to it, all you need to do is select all attributes, but I’m not going to do that here. I’m not going to deal with the images. So I’m going to click on it. And you can see there’s nine options. If you don’t have nine images yet, that’s okay. But you must upload a main image and make sure you’ve followed the guidelines from the images lesson. And if you’ve got any extra images you can upload right now, then do so. But you can always come back and add these later. Then all you need to do is click on upload and navigate on your computer to where you’ve saved your image. So in my case, this one, Takaholder’s main image. And as you can see, it’s an absolutely terrible image, but it’s not like I’m going to create this special image. Just for the training, or in fact, steal anyone else’s from Amazon. So you basically highlight it and click open. And then you can see it’s uploaded. Now I do have one lifestyle image, which is basically adjust the Takaholder’s with some food in it. So again, I’m going to click on upload. And this time, I’m just going to double-click on the Takaholder’s lifestyle one. And there we go. So we’ve got two images. So we’ve now completed everything it’s asked us to do with the exception of here. But remember, we tick these, has not being applicable, so it should allow us to save. So here is the moment of truth. Are we going to get any errors? So I’ve done everything I need to do. So I’m going to click on save and finish. So as you can see, there are three items that require attention. Click OK button to find the first item. Make sure you check each tab. So right now, it’s not letting me do that. So I’m going to click on OK and size. I’m going to put pack of four, because I really don’t know what they’re expecting me to put in there. Collection name. I’m going to put kitchen over Takaholders and included components. I’m just going to put four Takaholders. And now it’s telling me I’ve got two errors. And I bet you this is going to be the UPC. So as you can see, we’ve got two errors. And these are down to the fact that I didn’t wait the full three days or even five days. So that the GTN I created with the brand and company name could be added to the database. So Amazon hasn’t found it. So it brings up this error message. So this proves the point. You need to wait and I would say a minimum of five days. GS1 tell us that three days should be enough, but I strongly recommend you wait five days. So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to change the brand name. I’m going to use my existing brand name from this account. This account is an old account. It’s defunct now. I haven’t been selling on it for over a year. But the brand name is registered with Amazon. They do recognize it. So it should work without any issues. But I’m going to pause the video. I’m going to go ahead and do that. And then we can finish off everything we need to do. But again, make sure you wait an absolute minimum of three days. And I recommend you wait five days before creating your listing. And that’s after you’ve made the GTN number in GS1 active just to be on the safe side. Okay. So it’s been accepted. You can see here your listing is being created. It may take up to 30 minutes. And so I’m going to pause the video and come back and we’ll see if it’s being created. Okay. So the good news as you can see is it’s created our listing for us. And it’s saying inactive out of stock. But there is one more thing we need to do. Obviously we’re going to update our title. I wouldn’t recommend you do that for a few days. But what we do recommend you do straight away is we’re going to go across here to the right and just to the right of edit. I’m going to click on the arrow. And then we’re going to click on close listing. You can see it’s saying you’ve selected one listing for the close listing action do you want to continue? And the answer is yes. And the reason we’re doing this is to preserve our honeymoon period. So basically we’ll leave this listing closed. You can still come in and edit it. If you get any issues with that, you can simply open the listing, make your changes and then close it again. But always remember to close it again. But I’m going to click on yes, continue. I don’t want to take a while. But it’ll come up in an event. She say that it’s inactive. Now keep an eye on your listing because if any error messages come up regarding hazmat or anything else, you’re going to need to fix those. But as of right now, you’ve done everything you need to do to create your product listing. So your action steps for this video, set the barcode setting to Amazon barcode, create your initial product listing inside your cell essential account. And then once it’s accepted, go in, click on edit and close the listing. But that’s it for this video. Take care.

Resources

Source lesson: Listing Content BONUS: Creating Your Initial Listing
Resources: none attached yet.

Track: 03 — Listing, Launch & Review Engine
Module: Listing Conversion System