Do I really need to provide a UPC / EAN for each product?

Do I really need to provide a UPC / EAN for each product?

Amazon requires you to provide a UPC / EAN only when listing new products, which do not exist on the Amazon website yet. In this case, you need to enter a valid UPC or EAN for each product and variation in the Product ID field you’ll find on the edit product page. Then you can apply a listing profile with a category specific feed template to fill in all the information required for your category of products.

For variable products, you need to enter a Product ID both for the "parent" product - the same way as you do with non-variable products - and for each variation as well. To add product IDs for a huge number of products in bulk, you should consider importing them from a CSV file.

Adding UPCs from CSV / Excel

To populate the Product ID field via CSV import, you just need to make your CSV importer create a post meta field with the name of _amazon_product_id. The UPC you store in this field will work exactly the same as if you had entered it manually when editing the product.

Using ASINs instead of UPCs

If you want to list a product which does already exist on Amazon though, you only need to tell WP-Lister the ASIN for this existing product – see Listing existing products on Amazon for more details. Since you don’t have to provide any category specific details, you do not need a listing profile at all – or you can use the generic Listing Loader feed template, which will work for all kinds of products and is much simpler to set up.

What are UPCs, EANs, GTINs, etc.?

All of these are globally unique IDs which identify a particular product and package size. While EANs are used in Europe, UPCs are used in the US and other countries - and ISBNs are used for books. Amazon does support the following Product IDs:

ISBN (International Standard Book Number): 10 digits or 13 digits
UPC (Universal Product Code): 12 digits
EAN (European Article Number): 13 digits
JAN (Japanese Article Number): 13 digits
GTIN-14 (Global Trade Item Number): 14 digits

For more information see Locating Product Identifiers on Amazon and Global Trade Item Number on Wikipedia.

I have my brand registered with Amazon and are allowed to leave the UPC / EAN empty...

Please visit our dedicated FAQ about Brand Registry.

Do I really need to provide a UPC / EAN for each product?

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