What’s Amazon ASIN And How Do You Get One? Here’s Everything You Need To Know

Amazon is the world’s leading online marketplace. According to Statista, they have 213.4 million unique website visitors each month.

That’s a lot – accordingly, it’s no big surprise that every merchant wants to sell their products through Amazon.

If you also want to sell your products on Amazon, you need an Amazon ASIN.

But what is an ASIN?

ASIN means Amazon Standard Identification Number. It is an Amazon internal number that helps them keep track of your products.

Every product on Amazon has a unique Amazon Standard Identification Number.

In this article, you’ll learn everything about Amazon ASIN – what it is, why you need an ASIN and how to get one.

What Is Amazon ASIN?

ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number and it’s simply the product identifier used by Amazon. A product identifier is a scannable number like a UPC (barcode) to identify a product.

If you don’t know what’s a UPC, here’s an example of it:

ASIN is Amazon’s internal unique identifier to keep track of all the products sold on Amazon. With over 2,734,713 active sellers on Amazon, it would be impossible if every seller has their own unique identifier for their products.

There’s only one exception – if you want to sell books on Amazon, you don’t need to have an Amazon ASIN. That’s because every book has it’s own ISBN as an identifier. Amazon uses this ISBN to identify books, they don’t use their own ASIN.

I really don’t know exactly why, but I think it’s because Amazon started as an online bookseller in 1995.

When Do You Need An Amazon ASIN?

First of all, if you want to sell your products through Amazon, you need an Amazon ASIN. You need one unique ASIN for every product you sell on Amazon.

Second, if you sell the same product on two different marketplaces – for example, Amazon US and Amazon Germany, you need two different ASINs.

If this in case, you need two one ASIN for the US marketplace and another one for the german Amazon marketplace.

The next thing is that you need different ASINs if you sell variations of your product. If this in case, you will need a parent ASIN for your initial product and different child ASINs for all your variations.

For example, suppose you sell a T-shirt in different sizes. You need an ASIN for the first product – the T-shirt – and further children’s ASINs for all variations, e.g. for a blue, yellow and pink shirt.

  

When You Don’t Need An Amazon ASIN…

If you want to sell a product that’s already on the Amazon marketplace, you don’t need to register a new ASIN because every product that’s sold on Amazon already has one.

If this is the case, you only need to research the ASIN. If you don’t know how to find the ASIN of a product, read on, I will explain in the next chapter how to do this.

However, if you’re a new seller and want to sell a brand new product on Amazon, you’ve to register a new ASIN for that product.

What you need to know is that there’s a limit for new sellers on how many new ASINs they can create. If you want to create more ASINs in the near future, you need to sell more products and increase your sales on Amazon.

I highly recommend checking out this site to find out more about Amazon’s restrictions on the creation of new ASINs.

How To Search For A Product’s ASIN

Looking for a product’s ASIN on Amazon is super easy. All you have to do is to search for the product on Amazon.

Then, navigate to the product detail page and scroll to the end of the page.

You will find the ASIN of the product at the end of the listing with the product information.

But there’s another opportunity to get a product’s ASIN even faster. What you can also do is to take a look at the URL entry of your browser:

The ASIN is usually at the end of the URL of the product page. Just make sure that there’s no referral code and you’re good to go.

How To Get A New ASIN

If you’re starting as a private label seller, you will probably sell a product that nobody else sells on Amazon.

If this in case, you need to create a new Amazon ASIN so that Amazon can identify your product.

But you only need to do that if you sell a unique product under your own private label brand.

If the product you want to sell is already on Amazon, you don’t have to create a new ASIN.

Here’s how to create a new ASIN for your product on your own:

First of all, you need a GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) for your product.

What is a GTIN?

Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) can be used by a company to uniquely identify all of its trade items. GS1 defines trade items as products or services that are priced, ordered or invoiced at any point in the supply chain.

Source: GS1

Where do you get a GTIN?

You can get it from the GS1. The GS1 is a worldwide organization which distributes GTINs, UPCs or ISBNs.

There are different packages and you should choose a package that isn’t too expensive but fully suits your needs.

There are a lot of online sellers that also sell GTINs. However, I highly recommend not to buy a GTIN from another seller than the GS1 since it will only make you problems in the future – trust me.

Once you have a GTIN for your product, it’s relatively easy to get an Amazon ASIN.

All you have to do is to head over to Amazon Seller Central and click on “Add a new product” and then on “Create a new product”.

Then, you’ve to upload your product’s GTIN and Amazon will automatically generate a new ASIN for your product.

Conclusion

It is necessary to have an ASIN to sell on Amazon. However, you only need to create a new ASIN if you want to sell a product on Amazon that does not exist yet.

Anyway, taking care of the ASIN is only an administrative task. Focus more on increasing your sales to succeed in the long run.

About the Author

Moritz Bauer has over 5 years of experience in eCommerce and Marketing. On his blog smartminded he writes about Amazon FBA.