Amazon flat file guide (2026): templates, upload and processing report errors

Short answer: an Amazon flat file is a spreadsheet you use to create, update or delete many products and offers at once. Amazon calls it an inventory file or a bulk listing template. You download it in Seller Central under Catalog > Add Products, on the Spreadsheet tab; Amazon builds it for the product types you select, and you upload the completed file as an Excel workbook. One file holds up to 10,000 product rows, and you need the Professional selling plan. The processing report tells you whether every row made it.

This guide covers the three template types, how the template is structured, the listing action, variations and the processing report. After that come the most common errors, what to know when you sell across several EU marketplaces, and a checklist. Everything is taken from Amazon's Seller Central help and developer documentation, accessed in October 2026.

Flat file, inventory file, bulk listing template: the same thing

“Flat file” is the name sellers use. It dates from the time when templates were uploaded as tab-delimited text files, a flat file with no formatting. Amazon talks about inventory files and bulk listing templates. They all mean the same thing: a spreadsheet with one row per SKU and one column per attribute.

It pays off as soon as you manage more than a handful of products. Amazon recommends the templates for adding many listings at once and for more than about 100 products, and the Add a Product form for single items. If you have variations, several marketplaces or frequent changes, you will hardly get around the file.

The three template types

Amazon offers three templates. Which one you need depends on whether the product is already in the catalog:

• Product Spreadsheet: for new products that are not yet in the Amazon catalog. You provide the full product details: title, description, images, price and attributes. One file can contain up to 20 product types.
• Listing Loader: for offers on products that already exist in the catalog. You provide the product ID and offer details such as price, quantity and condition, and little or no product data.
• Price and Quantity: for updating the price and quantity of existing offers. You provide only SKU, price and quantity.

Matching runs on the product identifier, meaning EAN, UPC, ISBN or ASIN. If Amazon finds no match and you are using the Product Spreadsheet, a new product detail page is created.

What has changed recently

If you last built a flat file a year or two ago, several things work differently now:

• The old category-specific templates and Book Loader templates have been retired. New products go through the Product Spreadsheet. If you upload an old template, Amazon shows a notice and offers Download converted template. Your data is preserved, but you need to add anything that is missing.
• You upload the file directly as an Excel workbook (.xlsx). Converting it to tab-delimited text is no longer necessary, although .txt and .tsv are still accepted.
• For Product Spreadsheets with up to 1,000 SKUs, Amazon offers an upload preview with a Validate your file option. It highlights errors in an online spreadsheet before you submit. You can also choose to have the listings enhanced with AI at that point.
• Listing Preferences let you save default values, such as “Batteries required: No”, that Amazon prefills in the first row of new templates.
• For software that sends listings through Amazon's Selling Partner API, Amazon has switched off the XML and flat file feeds. They were deprecated on 18 March 2024 and removed on 31 July 2025; integrations now use JSON feeds or the Listings Items API. According to Amazon, this does not affect uploads you make yourself in Seller Central.

So the flat file is not dead. What is gone are the old category templates and the flat file route for software. For uploads in Seller Central, the inventory file remains in 2026 the tool for anything beyond a few individual products.

Downloading the template

To generate a Product Spreadsheet in Seller Central:

• Open Catalog > Add Products and choose the Spreadsheet tab.
• Click Download Blank Template, then Download Product Spreadsheet.
• Select your product types, either by searching with keywords or a product title, or by browsing categories. Amazon preselects matching product types.
• Select the stores, meaning the marketplaces, where you want to create or edit listings.
• Click Generate spreadsheet. The template downloads.

For existing listings there is a shortcut: under Inventory Reports, request the Category Listings Report. It contains the values you have submitted so far. Change only what needs changing and upload it again.

Structure: column groups, required fields, tabs

The template is organized into column groups: Variations (parent SKU, parentage level, variation theme), Product identity and details (SKU, product type, product ID, title, brand, description and other attributes), Images, Offer (price, quantity, fulfillment channel, condition, B2B pricing), Fulfillment (handling time, prep instructions), and Safety and Compliance (batteries, hazmat, regulatory attributes).

Every attribute is labeled required, conditionally required or optional. Conditionally required means the field becomes mandatory once you enter a certain value in another field. Optional columns are collapsed in the default view; the 1 and 2 buttons in the top-left corner or the +/- signs above the columns expand them. The Data Definitions and Valid Values tabs explain every field and list the accepted entries, and the Images tab summarizes the image standards.

A few fields deserve extra care:

• SKU: unique per product and cannot be changed later. Every new SKU creates a new record; data for an existing SKU replaces the old data.
• Product ID: an EAN has 13 digits. Excel strips leading zeros; an apostrophe before the number prevents that.
• Search terms: most product types offer up to five fields. What belongs in them is covered in the backend keywords guide.
• Price: formatted as a number, with one consistent decimal separator, especially if you use commas.
• Images: as URLs in the image columns, or uploaded afterwards with the image upload tool. Without an image, a new SKU is not buyable.
• Handling time: 0 to 30 days. If you leave it out of an update, it can fall back to the default of 1 to 2 days, so include it every time.

The listing action: create, edit, delete

The Listing Action column tells Amazon what to do with each row. In older templates the column was called update_delete, with the values Update, PartialUpdate and Delete.

• Create or Replace (Full Update): creates a new listing or replaces the existing one with the values in your row. This is the default when the column is left blank.
• Edit (Partial Update): changes only the attributes you fill in. Blank fields stay as they are.
• Delete: removes the SKU from your catalog, together with the offer and your product data.

The most expensive mistake in this column is its default. If you only want to change a price, leave the column blank and fill in just SKU and price, you trigger a full update, and that replaces the listing with exactly the few values in the row. For single changes, use Edit or the Price and Quantity template. If a product should only be unavailable for a while, set the quantity to zero instead of deleting it.

Variations: parent and child rows

Variations such as sizes or colors are built as a family of one parent row and several child rows. Amazon requires the relationship whenever a suitable variation theme exists for your products.

• Parent row: its own SKU, Parentage Level set to Parent. It is not sold; it holds the family together.
• Child rows: one SKU per variation, Parentage Level set to Child, and the parent's SKU in the Parent SKU column.
• Variation theme: the same in every row of the family, for example size, color or both. The available themes depend on the product type.
• Title: every child gets its own distinguishable title, for example with color and size.

When deleting, remember: removing the parent turns all children into standalone listings. To move a child to another family, delete it first and then assign it to the new parent SKU.

Uploading and reading the processing report

You upload in the same place: Add Products, Spreadsheet tab, Upload your file section. Check Upload Status lists every submission with its batch ID and status. Large files can take up to eight hours, according to Amazon, and the history shows the last three months or up to 100 submissions.

Once the file is processed, download the processing report there. The top shows a summary: SKUs processed, successful, successful with other errors, unsuccessful, and those with warnings. Below that, every affected row gets a status and error details:

• original-record-number: the row in your file. The two header rows are not counted, so record 1 is row 3. Add 2.
• error-code: the error number, which you can look up in Amazon's error code explanations.
• error-type: Error means the row was not applied. Warning means it was applied but may not appear as intended.
• error-message: a short explanation, often with the fix.

Filter by error-type first and work through the errors, then the warnings. You do not need to upload the whole file again: a file containing only the corrected rows is enough.

Common errors and how to fix them

• Error 8541, data conflict: a value in your row, such as brand, title or color, contradicts an existing ASIN with the same product ID. If your product matches that ASIN, copy the catalog values exactly, down to spaces and capitalization. If it does not, check the EAN; manufacturers sometimes reuse codes.
• Error 8560, incomplete details: Amazon can neither match an ASIN nor create a new one. Common causes are a template for the wrong product type, empty required fields or an invalid product ID, such as an EAN that lost its leading zero.
• Old template: category-specific templates now produce errors in the report. Download a current Product Spreadsheet or use the conversion.
• Values outside the list: whatever the Valid Values tab specifies has to be entered exactly. Your own spellings for colors or materials cause errors.
• Price format: text instead of numbers, or mixed decimal separators. Format the price columns as numbers.
• Data gone after an update: almost always Create or Replace instead of Edit in the Listing Action column.

Several EU marketplaces in one file

If you select several stores when generating the template, it gets extra columns for store-specific offer data. For each store where you want to sell, provide at least a price, in that store's local currency, which is shown in the column header. Use one decimal separator throughout the file.

If the product detail page does not yet exist in a secondary store, Amazon tries to create it by translating your product data. That can take up to 48 hours. It is convenient, but machine translation rarely hits the terms shoppers in France or Spain actually search for. For titles, bullets and search terms, your own localized copy per marketplace is worth the effort.

Three more things to know in the EU:

• Conflicts across borders: Amazon checks some attributes across all stores. If you get a data conflict with a message in another language, the cause lies in another store, and you fix it there first.
• Product safety (GPSR): since 13 December 2024, Amazon has required an EU responsible person, manufacturer contact details, and warning and safety information for non-food products in its EU stores. You provide them in the compliance dashboard or via inventory file; Amazon's developer documentation lists attributes such as gpsr_manufacturer_reference, dsa_responsible_party_address and gpsr_safety_attestation for this. If they are missing, Amazon says listings risk removal.
• Belgium: there you choose the listing language, Dutch or French, when you download the template. Every SKU in that template must then be in that language.

Checklist before you upload

• A current Product Spreadsheet for exactly your product types, not an old category template.
• All required and conditionally required fields filled in, values taken from the Valid Values tab.
• Unique SKUs, EANs with 13 digits and no lost zeros.
• Listing Action set deliberately per row: Edit for partial changes, Create or Replace only for complete rows.
• Variations with a parent row, parentage level, parent SKU and variation theme in every row of the family.
• Prices as numbers, in each store's local currency, with one decimal separator.
• Handling time included, image URLs reachable.
• GPSR information complete for every EU store.
• After uploading, download the processing report, filter by error-type and re-upload only the corrected rows.

How Torch Listings delivers the flat file

Torch Listings writes titles, bullets, descriptions and search terms from evidenced product data and exports the finished listing as an Amazon flat file, for 100 ASINs just as for one. If you already have your own template from Seller Central, Torch Listings can fill that one too.

The upload is yours. Torch writes nothing into your Seller Central, and nothing goes live without your upload. You then read the processing report as described above. Before that, you can check existing exports for free with the listing check against the limits for titles, bullets, keywords and images; the file never leaves your browser.

Sources

All sources accessed on 9 October 2026.

• Amazon Seller Central help: “Bulk listing templates” (G1641; template types, transition, upload, processing report).
• Amazon Seller Central help: “Build your inventory file” (G581; structure, listing action, variations, multiple stores).
• Amazon Seller Central help: “Error code explanations” (17781).
• Amazon Seller Central help: “Error 8541” (G200692330) and “Error 8560” (G200692370).
• Amazon Seller Central help (Germany): choosing the preferred listing language (Belgium).
• Amazon Selling Partner API changelog: “Deprecation of Feeds API support for XML and Flat File Listings Feeds” and “Update: Removal date … changed to July 31, 2025”.
• Amazon Selling Partner API changelog: GPSR attributes in the Listings Items API and JSON listings feeds.
• Amazon Seller Forums, Ezra_Amazon: “Important Announcement: General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) Implementation”.
• Amazon Seller Forums, Manny_Amazon: “Listings Lounge: Add a Product vs. Inventory File Templates”.