A guide to listing your products on Amazon – with or without barcodes

amazon-listing-gtin

Amazon is the world’s biggest marketplace with over 101 million Prime users in the United States alone. 

Regardless of where you are in the world, if you are a seller of any business size, it is the best place to get exposure. 

However, a lot of new sellers have trouble getting started with listing their products on Amazon.

You might Google about it and see complex terms like barcodes, GTIN, EAN and more.

Sit back and let’s take me explain in simple terms how you can listing your products on Amazon and give your business a boost in revenue.

Two methods of listing your products on Amazon

    Using Barcodes

Amazon systems are barcode-driven. Each unit you send to a fulfillment center requires a barcode so that it can be tracked throughout the fulfillment process.

The Universal Product Code (UPC) (redundantly: UPC code) is a barcode symbology that is widely used in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries for tracking trade items in stores.

GTIN stands for Global Trade Item Number. It is a numbering system developed by GS1 System (https://www.gs1.org) for identifying trade items such as products and services.

The International Article Number (also known as European Article Number or EAN) is a standard describing a barcode symbology and numbering system used in global trade to identify a specific retail product type, in a specific packaging configuration, from a specific manufacturer.

JAN: An EAN-13 number includes a 3-digit GS1 prefix (indicating country of registration or special type of product). A prefix with a first digit of “0” indicates a 12-digit UPC-A code follows. A prefix with first two digits of “45” or “49” indicates a Japanese Article Number (JAN) follows.

If your products have barcodes that are recognized by Amazon, it is much easier to get your products listed using a product feed solution like ExportFeed.

Where can you apply for barcodes?

Since Amazon validates the barcodes from GS1, ISBN and GEPIR, the barcodes should be purchased solely from those prodviders. 

What type of the sellers require barcodes?

The first step for knowing whether or not you need barcodes is to check whether the product’s brand requires GTIN.

Verify if the exemption is eligible for your category. If it is eligible then you do not require Barcodes. 

Check if that product is already listed on Amazon.

  • Request approval from the other seller and get the barcodes from the provider.
  • Listed products on Amazon also provides the barcodes. 

    Listing your products on Amazon without barcodes

If your product does not have a product ID (barcode), also called a GTIN (Global Trade Item Number), you might be eligible to request a GTIN exemption depending upon the category that Amazon offers. 

There is a list of brands that require a GTIN to list on Amazon. GTIN exemptions are not available for these brands. Any product that belongs to any of these brands and does not have a GTIN will be suppressed.

The fastest way to list your products on Amazon

Now that you’re aware of all of the methods that you can use to list you products on Amazon, you might still be wondering how you’ll be able to spend hours, if not days on creating XML files for your products.

Luckily, you can use a feed automation solution that does all of this for you and can help not only Amazon but other merchants and marketplaces such as Facebook, Google Merchant, Etsy, ShareASale and a lot more.

ExportFeed is one of the best solutions that gives you complete control over your feed files along with the flexibility to customize any aspect of your listing. 

You can give it a free try and see for yourself if its the right fit for your business.

I hope these points helped clear up your confusions related to listing your products on Amazon. 

If you have any questions relating to any of these topics, please feel free to leave a comment and our support team will be happy to assist you in any way possible.

Real-time and metafield sync for Etsy Released!

realtime-metafield-sync

We’re starting 2020 strong with a much-needed feature that has been requested by ExportFeed’s customers for some time.

Our development team has been quite busy working on new features while making sure they’re quality-tested very meticulously before releasing them. 

Let’s dive right into it!

Real-time sync

ExportFeed customers will now be able to sync all of their orders and inventory in real-time instantly. Pretty self-explanatory. 

This will be a huge benefit for Shopify stores that have hundreds of thousands of products. You can be assured that you do not oversell or undersell because of slow sync time.

Pricing packages eligible for real-time sync

Since this is an exclusive feature that is suitable for bigger stores, we’re offering real-time sync to two packages:

  • Super Seller ($89.99/month with 100k SKUs) and
  • Platinum Seller ($129.99/month with over 100k SKUs)

Metafield sync

ExportFeed is one of the first companies to roll out this exclusive meta-field sync feature.

It will not only help you stay visible across multiple search engines but also help you reach a significantly bigger audience and ultimately result in higher sales.

Here’s what meta-field sync can fetch from your products and feed them to search engines like Google and Bing:

  • SEO title
  • Amazon bullets
  • Custom price
  • Google Schema support
  • Search engine friendly data

Pricing packages eligible for metafield sync

You will be able to enjoy the full benefits of ExportFeed’s metafield sync feature with three packages:

  • Advance Seller ($59.99/month with upto 50k SKUs)
  • Super Seller ($89.99/month with 100k SKUs) and
  • Platinum Seller ($129.99/month with over 100k SKUs)

What if I am already subscribed to these plans?

You have nothing to worry about.

If you have purchased any of these eligible subscription packages, you will still be able to integrate the metafield and real-time sync feature through your existing dashboard.

Interested to learn more about these features? Get in touch with our support team and we’ll set everything up in no time!

 

Amazon’s limit on Personally Identifiable Information(PII) – How it affects ExportFeed users

Amazon PII

The world’s largest online marketplace and cloud computing platform recently broke the news on the importance they put on the data privacy of their users.

You might even have been notified about the changes Amazon made to their Marketplace Web Service (MWS) API Data protection policies which will now put a lot more restrictions on your Amazon data.

Service providers like ExportFeed still do not have the specifics on the range of changes that are bound to happen in the coming months.

However, we’re already taking all possible implications on the new security update into consideration to make sure our customers are still able to seamlessly create and manage their listings on Amazon with ease.

Before diving into the limitations on PII, let’s briefly take a look into what PII is.

What is Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?

PII, in simple terms, refers to any information that could potentially be used alone or with other relevant data to identify a particular person.

This includes your full name, date of birth, bank account number, email address, Social Security Number (SSN) and even medical records.

People are getting more and more concerned with the amount of information they share with any product/service, which is why Amazon had to make recent changes to their data protection policies.
What falls under Amazon’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII)?
The new security requirements set by Amazon limits access to the buyers’ personally identifiable information (PII) which include

  • Buyer name
  • Recipient name
  • Shipping address

These fields might only be accessible in case of tax and merchant fulfilled shipping.

How does Amazon’s PII limit affect ExportFeed users?

Here’s the good news: the new data protection policies will only affect Europe-based businesses.

If you’re using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you have nothing to worry about either.

If your online store has a .eu domain, you will need to make some changes moving forward.

From this point onward, third-party services like ExportFeed will no longer have access to this information which creates complications on how we process orders.

ExportFeed features that might be compromised

Order sync

Since we will no longer be able to extract even the basic contact details like the buyer’s full name, email address and shipping address, you will only be notified when someone buys your products without knowing anything about them.

You will still be notified when a new order is placed on your store and get their respective product/order IDs.

However, if you do not have access to their contact details, you will have no idea where to ship the purchases.

Inventory sync

ExportFeed’s inventory sync will not be affected by the new PII limit to a certain extent.

In simple terms, your inventory will still be synced but if you try to view the buyer’s name, it will be inaccessible.

What can European stores do now?

Bluntly put, there really is no way around these new data protection policies.
If you run a small-sized to medium-sized store, you might be able to manually sort through and verify orders.

However, if you get even tens or hundreds of orders each day, manually verifying all orders might be impossible considering the cost of your employees.

Please feel free to contact our support if you want to have a one-on-one session with our expert team.

Etsy WooCommerce Sync with ExportFeed plugin – What to expect?

etsy woocommerce sync

ExportFeed plugin for Etsy WooCommerce sync recently received an update with the realtime sync functionality for WooCommerce and Etsy products. That’s great news as you don’t have to worry about the inventories and prices changes anymore. But here are some of the overlooked yet important features that our ExportFeed plugin handles for you.

Let’s check them quickly to get more benefit from them.

What sells more during the Halloween? Don’t miss to list these products

products to sell on happy halloween

With Halloween approaching, we’d like to extend our warm wishes for that. However, as we are in business to help you grow your sales, we’ve collected a list of products that sell more during Halloween. If you haven’t listed them on your sales channel, don’t worry as our products and support team can get you started right away.

Now, continuing with the list of products that will increase your revenue for the Halloween

Halloween is the second-largest commercial holiday, with Christmas being the first. During this time, there are a lot of celebrations and celebration vibes going around.