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Selling on Amazon is not practically easier. There are set guidelines for how to sell on Amazon, which products can you sell on Amazon, restricted categories on Amazon and UPC/EAN guidelines. If you are selling on Amazon, then, you must have dealt with black and white lines of barcodes. Though barcodes are now not limited to online selling rather the bricks and mortar stores are using the labels on the products yet the black and white lines are more important in online selling. 

What is Barcode?

• Barcode is a unique identifier that differentiates every product with a unique number associated with it. The barcodes are read by the barcode scanner (an electronic device) which prints the number embedded within the black and white lines on the labels of the products.   
• It works like a database that holds the information about the products as the name of the products, color, size, cost, stock, etc. 
• It keeps the record of the products that help you to maintain the inventory and stock in your warehouse or when you are using FBA. 

Why Amazon needs it?

Amazon bounds its sellers to generate the barcodes for every product they are selling, for this, you might be irritated as it is a complex process. But it’s not that much difficult to have UPC and EAN for your products. 

Amazon deals with millions of products and sellers through its FBA services. Here, it has a myriad of products stocked in its warehouse which it delivers to the customers while order fulfillment. At this place, there can be many products that are exactly similar to each other but are from different seller Amazon store. Therefore it’s impossible to identify the individual products by their name or seller name. Here barcodes come as a solution. With the easy scan of the few lines, Amazon can differentiate it and efficiently send the right items to the customers. This saves you to face any issue with other sellers selling products similar to you.

Let us tell you why barcodes are important and useful to you. 

1. Inventory control: Barcode comprises the information about the SKU, product name, its quantity and therefore by the barcode you can know which items do you need to stock or which do you not.
2. Increases Speed of Order Fulfillment: Barcodes not only differentiates the products but they boost the transaction speed also. The Point of sale (POS) speed gets increased through barcode scanning rather than using the manual process.
3. Boost the accuracy rate: UPC codes of the products in the barcode form includes the name of the product, color, size and every detail that a seller needs while packing a product for dispatch. You get every essential information at one place through UPC codes and therefore saves you from making mistake from any distraction if you need to go and collect every information from the manual records and register. 
4. Improves Data accumulation: Since you are dealing online and everything is being digitized, using UPC and EAN on Amazon is the next step. Amazon deals with the product id and SKU and in digital form, it uses UPC and EAN codes. This efficiently accumulates the product’s data in a short space. 
5. No special staff is required: with the ease of scanning, the barcodes can easily be scanned by the scanner, with no need for technical staff. If you are fulfilling the order through your own warehouse (MFN), you can easily sell and send the items through the barcodes with no need for technical staff. But if you are using the FBA service of Amazon, no need to bother as it handles the barcodes very perfectly. 

Conclusion

Whether you sell a small item or a big item, a cloth or a grocery, an electronic device or furniture, every item needs to have a barcode printed on it to make further order fulfillment. We have more often seen the Amazon sellers are caught into UPC/EAN and product id issues while listing their products on Amazon. For resolving their issues, we have briefly described UPC/EAN on Amazon. Read to know more: Facing UPC or EAN barcode or Product Id issue in Amazon Listing?

At one end, the concept of barcodes has eased the way of selling while at the other end it has added many complexities to the seller’s end. Every marketplace has its own criteria and so as the Amazon. Amazon complies with its sellers to generate the barcodes (UPC/EAN) from GS1 (Global Standard 1) organization. If you face any difficulty, come to evantage, the best Amazon service provider.