Overview

Error 95013 is a character encoding error that Amazon sellers encounter when uploading product data through flat files or inventory feeds in Seller Central. The error indicates that one or more fields in your upload contain characters that fall outside the ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1) character set, which Amazon requires for certain feed submissions. Understanding what triggers this error and how to resolve it can save sellers significant time when managing their catalog.

Key Points / What Sellers Need to Know

• Root cause — This error fires when a field in your upload file contains non-ASCII or special characters that cannot be represented in the ISO-8859-1 character encoding standard.
• Affected uploads — The error typically appears during flat file uploads, inventory file submissions, or API-based feed submissions where character encoding validation is enforced.
• Column-specific — The error message identifies which column contains the problematic characters, making it easier to locate and fix the offending data.
• Quick resolution — Replacing or removing unsupported special characters from the flagged field and re-uploading the file will resolve the issue.

What Causes This Error

ISO-8859-1, also known as Latin-1, is a character encoding standard that supports 256 characters, primarily covering Western European languages. When sellers copy and paste product information from external sources such as manufacturer websites, word processors, or spreadsheets, hidden special characters can inadvertently make their way into the data. Common culprits include curly quotation marks (often called "smart quotes"), em dashes, trademark symbols from non-standard fonts, and characters from non-Latin scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Cyrillic. Even something as subtle as a non-breaking space copied from a webpage can trigger this validation error.

How to Fix the Error

Start by identifying the specific column referenced in the error message. Open your flat file or feed template in a plain text editor such as Notepad, Sublime Text, or VS Code rather than Excel, since spreadsheet applications can mask hidden characters. Search for unusual characters in the flagged column and replace them with their standard ASCII equivalents. For example, replace curly quotes with straight quotes, em dashes with hyphens, and remove any accented characters that are not part of the Latin-1 set. If you are working with Excel, save your file using the "CSV (Comma delimited)" format and ensure your system's encoding is set to Western European (ISO-8859-1) or UTF-8 where supported. After cleaning the data, re-upload the corrected file through Seller Central.