Overview

When you upload product listings through Amazon Seller Central—whether via flat files, inventory loader, or other bulk tools—Amazon validates every entry against its formatting and data requirements. Entries that fail validation generate errors in your processing report, and those products are excluded from the catalog until the issues are corrected. Understanding these errors is essential for keeping your listings live and your catalog accurate.

Key Points / What Sellers Need to Know

• Processing reports flag invalid entries — Amazon checks every submitted product against its data requirements and generates an error notification in your processing report when something doesn't comply.
• Errored products are excluded from catalog builds — Any listing that triggers an error will not appear on Amazon until the issue is resolved, which means lost visibility and potential lost sales.
• Errors serve as a safeguard — The validation process is designed to protect your catalog from displaying incorrect or malformed product data to customers.
• Common causes include data length violations — For example, submitting a product description that exceeds 1,000 characters will trigger a processing error.
• Errors must be resolved and the product resubmitted — Simply acknowledging the error is not enough; you need to fix the underlying data issue and upload the corrected entry.

How Processing Report Errors Work

Every time you submit product data through a bulk upload method in Seller Central, Amazon runs the submission through a validation engine. This engine checks each field against a set of rules—maximum character counts, required fields, valid values for category-specific attributes, correct formatting for identifiers like UPCs or ASINs, and more. When a product entry violates any of these rules, Amazon flags it as an error in the processing report associated with that upload. The product is then held back from that day's catalog build, meaning it won't go live or be updated on the Amazon storefront until the problem is corrected.

Common Types of Processing Errors

Several categories of errors appear frequently in processing reports. Data length errors occur when a field value exceeds its allowed character limit, such as a product description surpassing 1,000 characters or a title exceeding the category-specific maximum. Missing required field errors arise when mandatory attributes like brand name, product type, or item condition are left blank. Invalid value errors happen when a field contains data that doesn't match the accepted options—for instance, entering a shipping weight in an unrecognized unit or providing a browse node that doesn't exist. Format errors can also occur with product identifiers like UPCs, EANs, or ISBNs if the values don't conform to the expected structure or checksum validation.