Amazon Pro Merchant account - worthwhile?

Hello,

Right now I've got about 400 books & CDs listed on half.com and about
100 on Amazon. I'm moving about 10% of my inventory a week on Amazon
and only about 3% a week on half. I'm considering joining the Pro
Merchant program on Amazon, since I'll be working my way up to at
least 1200 or so stock items by year's end. I have two questions:

1) Do you consider it worthwile to join? I'm selling more on Amazon
than half, and if I get to my goal of selling between 100 - 150 items
a week, it would be nice to save the .99 fee. But I see that Pro
Sellers must use the Inventory Loader and can't list things
individually, correct? I've read some complaints about the Loader not
working right, but then I wouldn't be listing more than 100 - 200 new
items a week.

2) Maybe this is a silly question, but can I use the Inventory Loader
with Quattro Pro? I don't have Excel, though I guess I could buy it.
Could I just do the spreadsheet in Quattro and save it as an Excel
file, or do I have to get Excel 2000 (which they recommend) for it to
work?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Sophie

In article <94e4806.0309121521.7515bb8c.DeleteThis@posting.google.com>,
s_borodin.DeleteThis@yahoo.com (Sophie Borodin) wrote:

 > Hello,
 > I'm considering joining the Pro
 > Merchant program on Amazon, since I'll be working my way up to at
 > least 1200 or so stock items by year's end. I have two questions:
 >
 > 1) Do you consider it worthwile to join? >

 > 2) Maybe this is a silly question, but can I use the Inventory Loader
 > with Quattro Pro?

Sophie

Longer response to follow tomorrow, unless someone says it for me first,
but my short answers would be:

(1) Yes, it's worth it. We sell a lot through Marketplace and ZShops --
enough to justify their painfully flawed loading system and poor tech
support!

(2) You can use any database or spreadsheet or what-have-you, as long as
you can upload a text file in UIEE format. Essentially, this just means
you have to insert certain codes before each field, eg item number,
author, title, etc. I don't know Quattro but I'm sure it would be
straightforward enough to set this up and then export as a text file; we
use FileMaker Pro that way.

Barnaby<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->