Overview

Sellers encounter Error 6000 in Amazon Seller Central when the bulk‑upload file they submit is completely empty or lacks recognizable data. The issue typically surfaces during inventory, listing, or pricing feed uploads and can halt critical catalog updates. Quickly confirming the file’s content and regenerating a proper file prevents costly delays.

Key Points

• Error 6000 signals an empty upload — Amazon’s validation engine rejects any file that contains zero rows of data, stopping the feed from being processed.
• Open the file in a plain‑text editor — Viewing the file in Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (macOS) reveals whether any characters exist beyond the header line.
• Regenerate truly blank files — If the text view shows no product records, recreate the file from the original data source instead of resubmitting the same file.
• Export format matters — Saving a spreadsheet as “CSV” or “Tab‑delimited” can fail silently, producing a zero‑byte file even though the spreadsheet appears populated.
• File size is a quick health check — A file reporting 0 KB or an unusually tiny size (e.g., 1 KB for a 5,000‑SKU feed) almost always indicates an empty upload.
• Third‑party tools can hide errors — Automated inventory managers may generate a file that looks correct in their UI but actually writes no rows to disk if a script crashes.

How Error 6000 Occurs

1. Export step fails — While exporting a product list from Excel, the “Save As” dialog is cancelled or the workbook is closed before the CSV is written, resulting in a zero‑byte file.
2. Wrong file selected — Sellers sometimes pick a template file (e.g., the original “Inventory Template.xlsx”) instead of the freshly exported “Inventory‑Update.csv,” causing Amazon to read an empty file.
3. Encoding or corruption issue — Using a non‑UTF‑8 encoding or a corrupted file system can make the file appear full in Excel but render it empty when Amazon’s parser reads it.

Each of these scenarios produces a file that looks normal in a spreadsheet program yet fails Amazon’s validation because the underlying data stream is missing.