Well....

Here is some additional info on this for those who might be interested to learn something out of it. I certainly have done.

I found out there is a special ebay technical support group in USA for technical help on this stuff.

So I sent them an email at: turbodata@ebay.com.... They responded within 2-hours. Very helpful indeed.

Why can't the regular CSR's learn from them. And they actually know their stuff too.

In order to make the UPC, MPN and BRAND fields work properly here is what you have to do...

For UPC the field heading in the CSV file has to read: Product:UPC

For MPN the field heading in the CSV file has to read: C:MPN

For BRAND the field heading in the CSV file has to read: C:BRAND

And Branding info is only to be present in the first record. ie the product record. In all the variation records it has to be left BLANK. This info is not very clear in the guide.

Once the above was done then all the item specifics data loaded correctly and with no errors.

For uploading product & variation images via the CSV file, first you have to load your image files onto an external server which I had done.

Then you put the full URL path + file name into the PicURL field. This is for the main product record and the variation pics.

Doing this does indeed load the image files into the ebay image servers.

But... you need to give them up to 24-hours after the CSV upload completes in order to complete image loading from your external server in the background. If you remove the image files from your external server too early then they may disappear from your listing.

Hence, why when I deleted them from the server they disappeared from my listing. But today when I delete them the listing remains intact. The guide does not mention this wait time at all.

So I've had a win and learned heaps.

Now my little self-developed Excel File Exchange interface is working very well indeed.

Listings are so much easier to do now.

Happy little camper!

Hope this thread is helpful to someone out there.