Cutting of Your Nose to Spite Your Face - Online Bookseller Style
September 2nd, 2010I have seen frequent complaints recently, on the Amazon seller forums and elsewhere, that “Amazon is expecting us to do their work by uploading images of our books ourselves!”
I find this a very silly point of view: if you want to sell a book, adding an image is one of the best ways to accomplish that. Why not just upload the image, sell the book, and move on?
If you want to see which of your listings are missing images, go to Seller Central Home: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/homepage.html and look for the Amazon Selling Coach box at the top right
By the way, there are several ways to add images at Amazon. If no image shows in search results you want to be sure to use Method 2; I can almost guarantee that when a buyer searches for a vintage copy of, say, the Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies, the listings that they will click through on are the ones with images in the search results.
Method 1: Share your customer image here. You have to have purchased from Amazon to use this. The image will only appear on the Product Detail Page. Useful, for example, when you have a book with a cover variant.
How: Just follow the Share your own customer images link from the image area.
Method 2: Edit this product. You have to be a Pro-Merchant to use this. The image will appear as the main image on the Product Detail Page, and will appear next to the entry on search. It will not be credited to the uploaders.
How: Select Edit from your Inventory - to the right of the page, you will see a box with this text: “As a pro merchant, you have the ability to contribute information to the product details in your Seller Account.” Click on “Edit this product” and follow the instructions.
Method 3: Add up to 5 offer-specific images to your listing. The best of all! Only available on collectible listings, these images appear with your book. When the listing is closed, the images go too.
How: Add when you create your listing, or go back later and edit it. Because I list Collectible books one-at-a time, I can’t tell you how to do this by bulk upload. If someone knows, perhaps they could post instructions in the BookThink forums.