Use the Purge and Replace option

When you upload an inventory file, you can use the Purge and Replace option to remove your current inventory and replace it with the inventory in the file. The listings that are not in the file will be removed from the Amazon website. If you upload an empty inventory file with Purge and Replace selected, all your listings will be deleted.

We recommend that you request and download an Active Listing Report before using the Purge and Replace option. The Active Listings Report provides a good basis for reviewing your existing inventory records. It can also serve as a backup file if there is an error in the file that you send when you perform a Purge and Replace.

When to use the Purge and Replace option

There are some good cases for using the Purge and Replace option.

Delete your entire inventory to start from scratch

If you need to remove and replace your entire inventory, you can upload an empty feed with just the headers and the Purge and Replace option selected. This enables you to delete all of your listings.

Use different SKUs to reference your products

If you decide to change the SKU naming convention that you are using to reference your products, you can use the Purge and Replace option to do this. However, you cannot use the Purge and Replace option to change your SKUs in the following two cases:

• If there is overlap between your old and new set of SKUs, where any new SKU references a different product than the old one, don't use Purge and Replace.
• If you are using the Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) service, don't use Purge and Replace. It is not possible to use a different SKU for a product fulfilled by Amazon. In this case, you can create new SKUs for all your products not fulfilled by Amazon and then delete all old SKUs.

When to avoid the Purge and Replace option

In general, it is not recommended to use the Purge and Replace option to routinely manage your inventory levels. Use the Purge and Replace option sparingly and for special cases when you need to start from scratch with new inventory counts or need to make changes to your SKU-naming conventions.

Specifically, we don't recommend using Purge and Replace to perform the following tasks:

Disabling out-of-stock offers

If you have a large inventory, you may feel tempted to make regular purge-and-replace uploads with inventory files containing only in-stock products. Using this method to disable out-of stock product listings is not recommended. If your file does not contain a complete list of the products that you want to make available for sale, you may unintentionally remove listings and product data contributions for some of them. Also, the processing time of a file with the Purge and Replace option may take several hours, and your available inventory levels may change during that time.

If you run out of stock on some products, use the Price and Quantity file to set the stock levels to 0. You can use this file to modify all of your listings, including those that were submitted manually through the Add a Product tool. It is also a more efficient process that saves you the additional effort of re-listing your products later.

Synchronising your product database with your Amazon product listings

Although it is not recommended, you may use the Purge and Replace option to keep the products that you list on Amazon synchronised with your own product database. The risk with this practice is having an error in your inventory file or uploading the wrong file, which may potentially erase your entire inventory on Amazon. This could result in lost sales opportunities while you re-list your products.

We recommend that you explicitly delete a product from your inventory only if you know that you are never going to sell that product again. If you are just temporarily out of stock, do not delete the product but rather set the quantity to zero (0).