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CheckIt Pro User Guide  
  Overview 

CheckIt Pro can be found by clicking Online in BookTrakker, then clicking the dropdown button to the right of Apps. Select CheckIt. When CheckIt opens, click the Verify Data with CheckIt Pro button, upper right corner. 

CheckIt Pro is a BookTrakker App used to make sure that your Amazon records are consistent in various ways with your BookTrakker records. It looks at Author, Title, Publisher, Cover and Date as associated with a given ASIN or ISBN in BookTrakker and on Amazon.

Over time we have discovered that often Amazon will stop using certain ASIN’s or ISBN’s and reassign your records to a new ASIN or ISBN, or less often, the user has the wrong ISBN to start with but never verified it against Amazon’s catalog. Sometimes the new ASIN or ISBN that Amazon assigns to your record is for a completely different book.

CheckIt Pro will find these mismatched records and enable you to delete them from Amazon, remove the ASIN or ISBN, and set them for reupload for matching or creating a new product detail page. Or you can search for replacement ASIN’s or ISBN’s yourself, either manually on Amazon or through GrabIt.

CheckIt Pro also identifies records in BookTrakker that have ASIN’s or ISBN’s that are no longer in use on Amazon. This means that these records in BookTrakker are not listed. In CheckIt Pro we have designated these as BT Orphans. You can set them for reupload with the ASIN or ISBN deleted from the record.

Warning: Amazon has informed us that buyer’s are NOT required to read Seller’s comments, so if you have a different book or a different Binding, and you say so in Comments, the buyer may not see that and order your copy, then get upset when the wrong book is delivered. Using CheckIt Pro will identify when this happens so you can take steps to protect yourself.

Misplaced ASIN/ISBN Records: If you have ASIN’s in the ISBN field or ISBN’s in the ASIN field CheckIt Pro will not process them for either Amazon Mismatches or BT Orphans. After download of data is complete CheckIt Pro will issue a report on how many records failed.

You need to create and execute two Hit Lists to find these records and move the data to the correct fields.

In BookTrakker, Inventory, Hit Lists tab, left side. Click New. Click OK. For finding ASIN’s in the ISBN field:

Status = Available 
Marketplace = Yes 
ISBN = B, Any Part of Field


Click Execute. You should get a list of records where an ASIN is in the ISBN field. Edit these records to move the ASIN into the ASIN field.

Second Hit List is similar to the above, except you are searching the ASIN field twice:

ASIN Not = B, Any Part of Field. Check the Not checkbox in between Search Field and Search Criteria. 
ASIN Not [Blank] Entire field. Check the Not checkbox in between Search Field and Search Criteria. Do not type into the empty field under Search Criteria, and change Any Part of Field to Entire Field.

This searches the ASIN field for records where there is something in the ASIN field but it does not contain a B. ISBN’s do not have a B.

Click Execute. You should get a list of records where an ISBN is in the ASIN field. Edit these records to move the ISBN into the ISBN field.

Once you have ISBN's in the ISBN field and ASIN's in the ASIN field you need to create a Hit List to process records, if you don't want to do your entire database. (Processing through CheckIt Pro is slow, by Amazon intention, so you want to limit how many records you do for each session)

Click Hit Lists tab on the left side. Click New. Name it. Click OK. You want:

Status = Available
Marketplace = Yes (Amazon UK or CA Ship |Not |No UK or No CA| Equal To )

About two inches below is Range Type

Select Numeric, Book ID, From:, To: to create a list of about 1000 records. (Repeat as necessary to get all records processed through CheckIt Pro)

Execute. Verify the count, then click the Red Hit List button at the top to get out of Hit List mode. 

You are now ready to use CheckIt Pro.  

Description of Features 
You access CheckIt Pro from the Verify Data button in CheckIt. Upper right corner. The CheckIt Pro control panel appears.

Print: Prints the list of results.

Choose Service: Select which Amazon site you are working with if more than one. If you only list on one Amazon site then it will use this by default.

Select Data: Two choices. This control remembers which one you used last and opens to that choice.

All Records: All records in BookTrakker with an ASIN or ISBN and Marketplace is checked or one of the shipping options for   Amazon CA or UK is selected.

Use Hit lists: Operates only on the records in the selected Hit List. If you use the hit Lists selection then it displays the last Hit List used.

Match Control Panel: Opens up the Match Control Panel, which is where you set your word matching filters as well as the Author format. See description of Match Control Panel features below.

Get Amazon Data: Initiates the search on Amazon for ASIN or ISBN data from BookTrakker records for matching against that data. The message box that appears for Downloading Amazon Data is designed to stay on top of everything on your screen. You can move it to a corner while you worn in other stuff, but you cannot minimize it to the taskbar.

Fix All BT Records: Operates on all records returned in the displayed list, be it Amazon Mismatches or BT Orphans.

Fix Selected BT Records: Operates on all checked records returned in the displayed list, be it Amazon Mismatches or BT Orphans.

Result Count: Displays the number of results for each operation.

Match Control Panel 
Word Count: Title, Author, Publisher, with check boxes for Author and Publisher. Selects how may words to match on. We have found 4 to get the best results. Click Save once you type in 4. 

Matching: Check boxes for matching with Date or Binding. Date is based on an exact match to the Date extracted from BookTrakker, being the last four digits in the Date field.

Binding is also an exact match, entire field, but CheckIt Pro converts data from the Cover field in BookTrakker for Hardcover or Paperback based on the following:

Hardcover: Hard, Cloth, HB or HC Paperback: Paperback, Soft, Wraps, SC, SB or PB

So if you have “Hard” as part of a word in Cover or HB then for CheckIt Pro’s matching we use Hardcover.

No data in the Cover field in BookTrakker is changed.

Author Representation: Do you want the Amazon results as Last, First or First, Last?

Rematch: Use this button to rematch on the original results after changing one or more match parameters. Rematch is working when Result Count decreases.

Reset: Loads the original match results from the initial search.

Save: Saves your settings for the initial search when clicking the Get Amazon Data button. Use caution with this. The purpose is to set your default settings for each search you do upon opening CheckIt Pro.

OK: Closes Match control Panel.

Not listed on the Match Control Panel is the list of noise Words to Exclude on the right side of the BASIN tab in GrabIt. CheckIt Pro ignores these words in the matching process.

Results Display 
Amazon Mismatches: Displays a list of records where one or more of the following fields have differences in the data: Author, Title, Publisher, Date or Binding (Cover). Edition is also displayed but is not used in the matching process.

Records are displayed with the ASIN/ISBN on the gray row, followed by the Rec# for the BookTrakker listing and data, then the Amazon listing and data. Double-clicking on the grey row which contains the ASIN/ISBN will copy the ASIN/ISBN to the clipboard. This is useful for looking up records on Amazon and similar such activities.

There is a check box to the left of each BookTrakker record, under the Action column.

BT Orphans: Displays a list of records in BookTrakker that have ASIN’s or ISBN’s that are no longer in the Amazon catalog.

Operation 
For best results you should do the following before using CheckIt Pro:

1. Make sure you have done your usual upload to all services.

2. Open CheckIt. Click Request Report. Click Download Report when the Notifications email arrives, or if you have that turned off then wait until you think Amazon has processed your request. You can check the Inventory Reports page in your account, when it is ready you can click Download Report.

3. Check the ISBNs check box under Option.

4. Check Copy to Field and select a field to copy the old ASIN or ISBN.

5. Click Update ASINs button. Click OK twice.

You are now ready to run CheckIt Pro.

The purpose of CheckIt pro is to help you to identify individual records on Amazon that do not match the same records in BookTrakker. Everything is based on the Rec#/SKU and then the ASIN or ISBN for that Rec#.

Searching speed is approximately 10-12 records per second on a high speed Internet connection. For very large databases it might be better to break it down to smaller Hit Lists and use that method for mapping. Either way the results will be similar.

Select All Records or Hit Lists. If Hit Lists select which Hit List to us. Click Get Amazon Data to start the download.

When a search is initiated by clicking Get Amazon Data CheckIt Pro grabs 10 records at a time from the BookTrakker database and uploads a request to Amazon for the data for each ASIN or ISBN, returning Author/Title/Publisher/Binding/Date and/or Edition information. This data is dumped into a table in memory, then the process is repeated. Any ASIN’s or ISBN’s that are not found in Amazon’s database end up in the BT Orphans table. If a record has both an ASIN and an ISBN then CheckIt Pro uses the ASIN.

During the download process something else is going on as well. As data is retrieved from Amazon matching BookTrakker records to this data also takes place, dumping mismatched records into the Amazon Mismatches table. A mismatched record is where any of the Matching fields do not match on the number of words specified or the Date or Binding if they are checked. CheckIt Pro matches any X words from BookTrakker to any X words in the Amazon data, where X is the number of words specified in the Title, Author or Publisher fields.

An example:

BookTrakker Title: Lonely Planets - Uncorrected Proof.

Amazon Title: Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy of Alien Life

With matching required for any three words these are different Titles. Looking at the results for Author, Publisher, Date and Binding one concludes this is the same book. If the number of words in Title is subsequently reduced to two, and the original search was restarted, then this title would not show up in results.

From the same database as the above result is another example, this time as a completely mismatched record:

BookTrakker: The Crane Maiden

Amazon: Growing Up With Divorce

Clearly they are completely different, and this is what CheckIt Pro is designed to find.

The default search is three words in Title, Exclude Single Letters, which means ignore single letters such as a, I, etc. Users can change the default to anything they want, after making the change they can click Save, and the new settings will become the default. You should play around with the settings to see what it does.

One way to do this is leave the default settings alone. Change the Title word count to 2, click Rematch. The number of results should drop as all of the previous results where only two words needed to match are removed.

Increasing the number or type of fields to the matching process may reduce the number of results.

Or check the Author or Publisher check box, and type in a 1 or a 2. Click Rematch.

The Reset button brings back all the results from the initial download so you can change the parameters to see other differences.

Make note of how often you have a different Binding than Amazon. This can cause you to have to issue a refund if the buyer complains; you can also get negative feedback.

For large databases you should run a series of named Hit Lists so as to get results that don’t take all day to generate. Keep in mind that CheckIt Pro can only process about 10 records per second.

Fixing Records – Amazon Mismatches 
When you fix records CheckIt Pro creates a delete file that it uploads to Amazon, then strips out the ASIN or ISBN and sets the record for Upload. You can execute a Hit List on Upload = Yes to find these records.

You can fix all records by clicking Fix All BT Records. Or you can check the records you want to fix and then click Fix Selected BT Records. CheckIt Pro will create and upload a file to Amazon of all the records to fix set to be deleted from Amazon. It will then delete the ASIN or ISBN in BookTrakker and set the records for upload, to be either rematched to existing records on Amazon or create new product detail pages.

BT Orphans 
BT Orphans are records in BookTrakker that have ASIN’s or ISBN’s that are no longer in use on Amazon. Fix All or Fix Selected. What happens is the ASIN or ISBN is deleted from the record and then it is set for upload, to be either rematched to existing records on Amazon or create new product detail pages.

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Last Modified:  January 05, 2015