How to Get a GTIN Number for Your Product Listings

You get a GTIN from GS1, the standards body that issues them. In the United States that means licensing either a single GTIN or a GS1 Company Prefix from GS1 US, assigning a number to each product, and using that number in your listings and on your packaging. Which of the two you need comes down to how many products and variations you have.

The reason to go to GS1 directly, rather than to a cheaper seller of barcodes, is that the marketplaces check. Amazon's staff have told sellers that GTINs are considered invalid if they are not vended by GS1 or recognised by the brand owner, and Walmart asks for numbers from a GS1 Company Prefix from anybody applying to sell on Walmart.

GTIN stands for Global Trade Item Number. GS1 describes it as a globally unique number that identifies a specific product you sell. The term gets used interchangeably with UPC and barcode, and they are not quite the same thing. The GTIN is the number. The barcode is what carries it on a package. In North America the usual form is a UPC-A barcode, and the number inside it is a GTIN-12, which is always twelve digits.

That distinction matters when you are buying. What you are licensing is the right to use a number in GS1's system. The barcode image is something you can generate from it, and GS1 US includes a tool for that with its licences.

GS1 US offers two routes. A single GTIN costs $30 to license, with no annual renewal fee, and comes with access to its online tool for creating the barcode and managing the product data. GS1 pitches it at small companies with only a few products that want to list quickly.

A GS1 Company Prefix lets you create many numbers from a single licence. Its price depends on its capacity, which is the maximum number of products it can identify, and it renews every year. GS1 publishes the current price for each capacity on its site, so check there rather than relying on a figure from an article.

Count before you choose, and count variations. GS1 is clear that a new GTIN should be assigned for each product and each variation of it, such as size, colour, style or package count. A single shirt in four sizes and three colours is twelve GTINs, so a range that looks small can pass the point where a prefix makes sense sooner than you expect.

Think about the year after next as well. If you run out of numbers on a prefix, GS1 says you can license another prefix or buy single GTINs. And if you let a prefix licence expire, it is terminated: you are no longer authorised to use the numbers from it on your products. That makes the renewal a real commitment, not an optional extra.

Barcodes sold cheaply online are usually numbers that were once licensed to somebody else. The trouble is what they say when a marketplace looks them up: GS1's records do not point to your company or your brand.

Amazon's own wording, from a staff post on its Seller Forums published in April 2021, reads: "GTINs are considered invalid if they are not GS1 vended or not recognized by the brand owner." The same post recommends getting GTINs directly from GS1 rather than from third parties selling GTIN licences, so that the right information is in the GS1 database. The post is several years old and the help page behind it needs a sign in, so check the current wording in your own Seller Central account. We have seen nothing to suggest that the position has softened.

Sellers on those forums report two further problems, which we pass on as their experience and not as Amazon's rule. A newly licensed GTIN can take a few days to be recognised, and a brand name on the listing that differs from the one entered with GS1 is a common reason for a refusal. So enter your details with GS1 exactly as they appear on your listings and your brand registration.

Not everything needs a number. Walmart says that sellers of products without a product ID, such as private label goods or handmade jewelry, can request a UPC or GTIN exemption. Amazon has an exemption route as well, and sellers report that the instructions appear in the error message when a listing is refused for lack of an identifier.

An exemption suits a product that genuinely has no identifier, and it applies to the marketplace that granted it. If you plan to sell through retailers or several marketplaces, licensing real numbers once is usually less work than asking each one in turn. It also gets harder to change later: a seller on the Amazon forums reported being told that a listing created with an invalid UPC could not simply be converted to an exemption, and that the fix was a new listing.

Start with your product list, including every variation, and decide between a single GTIN and a prefix from that count. License from GS1 under the exact legal name and brand you will sell under. Assign one number to each variation and keep a simple record of which is which, because a reused number causes more trouble than a missing one, and GS1 tells you never to alter the digits.

Then generate the barcode, put it on the packaging, and give the marketplace time to recognise the number before you plan a launch date around it. If you are starting on Amazon, how to start selling on Amazon shows where this falls in the wider order of work.

A correct identifier only gets you listed. What the listing then says is what decides whether it sells, and that is the part our product listing optimization work is about.