Amazon Catalogue Sync

Sync is the button that makes your Rufusly catalogue and your real Amazon inventory describe the same products. It lives on the Amazon Listings view at /listing-studio/inventory and needs a connected Seller Central account.

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What Sync does, in order

Sync runs two passes and the order is not interchangeable.

1. Match your live SKUs into the catalogue

Rufusly walks your Amazon inventory and creates a catalogue row for every SKU that exists on Amazon but not in Rufusly. Each new row gets the SKU, the ASIN, the current title, the product type, and the main image Amazon holds for it.

Existing rows are treated carefully. Your own title is never replaced with Amazon's, because a rewrite in progress is supposed to differ from what is live. Only fields that are still empty get filled in, so a missing ASIN, a missing image or a missing product type is repaired without touching anything you have written.

A live SKU with no title at all is reported rather than invented: Rufusly will not manufacture a catalogue row it has nothing to build from.

2. Backfill the listing content

Once the rows exist, Rufusly fetches each listing's current content from Amazon and caches it: title, bullets, description, backend search terms, images, and Amazon's own status for the listing.

Backend search terms matter here. Amazon returns them as separate entries rather than one string, and Rufusly joins them and checks the result against the 250 byte limit. Over that limit none of your search terms index at all and Amazon shows no error, so this is often the first time a seller learns about it.

Amazon's status is read rather than assumed. A listing Amazon reports as buyable is marked active, a listing with an error-level issue is marked suppressed, and a listing that exists but is not buyable is marked incomplete. None of those are the same as a draft.

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Offer-only listings

Some SKUs are offers against an ASIN somebody else created. The listing itself carries no content: the title, bullets and description all live in Amazon's shared catalogue rather than in your listing attributes.

Without a fallback, those SKUs would sync as empty and every screen would report them as having no content, which would be a lie about your listing. So when a listing returns no bullets and no description, Rufusly falls back to Amazon's catalogue record for the ASIN and takes the title, bullets, description and search terms from there instead.

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Real product images

Images come from your listing's own image locators first: the main image plus up to eight others.

If the listing carries none, which is normal for offer-only SKUs and for older listings, Rufusly falls back to the catalogue images for the ASIN. Amazon returns the same image several times at different resolutions and not largest first, so Rufusly keeps the tallest version of each variant rather than whichever came back first. That is the difference between a thumbnail grid of real product photography and a grid of blurry placeholders.

If a product in your catalogue has no main image and the sync found one, the product record gets it.

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Why Sync is incremental

Amazon throttles its API hard. Sync therefore works in bounded batches and continues until there is nothing left, rather than trying to swallow a whole catalogue in one request and being cut off halfway. The button shows which pass it is on: matching SKUs first, then caching content.

You can leave the page and come back. Nothing is lost, and the next Sync picks up where the last one stopped, oldest and never-synced listings first.

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How often to sync

Rufusly refreshes anything it has not read from Amazon in 90 days, and treats content older than that as stale on the dashboard. A Sync clears exactly what the dashboard flags as stale.

Beyond that, sync after you have changed listings outside Rufusly, and before a session where you plan to trust what Rufusly shows you about a listing.