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Amazon Shopper Survey Results: Four Insights For Amazon Sellers

We look into how Amazon customers really buy, from a survey of over 2,000 shoppers, and pick out the most important findings for sellers.

Ecommerce agency Goat Consulting asked over 2,000 Amazon.com users about how they shop, with questions ranging from product research and brand preferences to the importance of price, reviews, images and advertising.

With the help of Will Tjernlund, Goat’s CMO and a successful Amazon seller in his own right, we’ve drawn out four of the most important findings for Amazon sellers. 

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1. Generic searches are 3x more common than brand name searches

Most Amazon shoppers start their search with a general product name or type, such as “running shoes” rather than a specific brand, such as “Nike sneakers”. 

Once customers have searched for a product, most often by using generic words rather than a brand name, the most important factor in their purchasing decision is price. 

After price, other factors play into a consumer’s purchasing decision. Predictably, reviews are the next most important factor. 

What does this mean for Amazon sellers?

This is good news for private labelers and other Amazon sellers who don’t have strong brand recognition. Your lesser-known brand isn’t as big a disadvantage as you might think. It’s a relatively open field.

This means that rather than focusing marketing efforts on building up a brand, it’s likely more efficient to concentrate on other factors. Search is the preferred way to find products on Amazon, so sellers should work on improving their search performance:

Research the most important keywords for the products you sell, considering alternatives to the most obvious and common search requests.

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This post Amazon Shopper Survey Results: Four Insights For Amazon Sellers is from Web Retailer.

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Selling to the USA? Here’s How To Get Paid Faster and Save on Currency Exchange

Payability and OFX have teamed up to offer a streamlined global cash flow solution and preferential rates for cross-border marketplace sellers.

A new global partnership provides online sellers with next-day payments from their U.S. marketplace sales, and big savings on currency conversion when they bring these sales proceeds back home.

On one side of the partnership is Payability’s Instant Access service. This provides next-day payments from marketplace sales, covering Amazon, Walmart, Newegg, Tophatter, Jet.com and MoreCommerce. Instead of payments taking weeks, online sellers can receive payments each day.

On the other side is OFX, with their Global Currency Account. This provides local currency accounts in U.S. dollars, British pounds, Euros, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars and Hong Kong dollars. Sellers can pay international suppliers directly from their account balance, or transfer funds home at exchange rates which offer significant cost savings.

The two services work in tandem to help sellers accelerate their cash-flow and bring more money back home. They can make more frequent stock purchases, pay suppliers more efficiently, and just grow faster overall.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new partnership between Payability and OFX.

How does Payability provide next-day payouts to sellers?

One of the biggest struggles high-growth sellers face is the constant delay in their cash-conversion cycle. Amazon pays out every two weeks, which isn’t ideal for sellers who need to buy more inventory and manage daily expenses. Other marketplaces can take even longer to pay out.

Payability tackles this issue by providing sellers with next-day payments.

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This post Selling to the USA? Here’s How To Get Paid Faster and Save on Currency Exchange is from Web Retailer.

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How to Find Trends and Create Trending Products to Sell on Amazon

Products that piggyback on popular trends can generate amazing sales quickly, but timing is everything and other sellers don’t always play fair.

This post is by Pilar Newman, an eleven year Amazon seller veteran who runs her business full-time while traveling the world. Pilar provides ecommerce training on her website and YouTube channel.

Learning how to capitalize on fast-moving industry trends can significantly bump sales for any ecommerce seller.

It’s an opportunity that sellers such as myself seek out like a hawk in order to quickly turn around products at some of the highest profit margins. This is especially true when one uses private labeling as a method to enter the marketplace, and ride the wave of a hot new trending item.

One of the easiest and fastest ways to profit from a trending item is to produce a secondary product relevant to the main item. This is often seen when the latest tech gadget is released, and a rash of new compatible accessory items erupt onto the marketplace.

But competition is very high when it comes to profiting from trending products, and you can’t just jump on the bandwagon and expect to be successful.

In this article I’ll tell you how I’ve made money from trends in the past, how you can identify hot products yourself, and my best tips and tricks for making the most profit with trending items. 

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What is a trending product?

The best way to explain what trending products are is to look at some examples.

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4 Things Sellers Get Wrong About Importing from China

Here’s why some products might be best avoided altogether, and how to ensure suppliers fully understand your product requirements

This post is by Maegan Burkhart, a Content Specialist at Asia Quality Focus.

Go to the listings for just about any type of product on Amazon and you’ll probably find a large portion of those goods are made in China. 

China is still the premiere manufacturing location for many importers, despite rising labor costs and recent trade tensions. Especially for inexperienced ecommerce sellers, it makes sense to start importing from China. It’s easier to find suppliers with the expertise to manufacture quality goods for overseas markets in China than elsewhere in Asia. 

But although ecommerce sellers have been importing from China for years, they still face many challenges with Chinese suppliers. Many misconceptions persist about how to import from China and effectively manage product quality there. 

Most misunderstandings with Chinese suppliers are a result of poor communication, unclear requirements and poor preparation. So here are some of the main things ecommerce sellers get wrong about importing from China. 

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1. Sourcing the wrong products

The first question ecommerce sellers face is “What are the best products to import from China”?

China has long been known as the “factory of the world”, where you can easily find many suppliers for a wide variety of products. But just because you can import a product from China doesn’t always mean you should.

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6 Negotiation Strategies to Use With Your Chinese Suppliers

How to get better prices from your suppliers without sacrificing quality. Includes tried-and-tested email scripts that you can use straight away.

This post is by Jae Jun, a seven-figure Amazon seller and founder of Gorilla ROI, software that connects Seller Central data to Google Sheets.

You’ve found a brilliant product on Amazon. The scouting methods and tools show you that this is the one.

You’ve gone through the initial steps of:

Contacting multiple suppliers and requesting samples

Rigorous sample testing

Narrowing it down to two suppliers based on the initial samples and price

At this point you are going to enter the negotiation stage as you don’t want to take the quoted prices at face value.

I’m going to share six simple strategies to help you negotiate and get better prices from your suppliers, without sacrificing quality and workmanship.

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What is the goal of negotiating?

The goal of your negotiations is to create a win-win scenario with your suppliers.

You want to find the best partner in terms of price and quality. You don’t want to choose a supplier simply because they offer the cheapest price. That could be a fatal mistake because you will likely get what you pay for.

If you are making widgets and supplier A quotes you $1.00 compared to $0.75 for supplier B, it is tempting to start negotiations with supplier B. But they could be using recycled materials for the widgets, taking shortcuts in manufacturing, and have no process for quality control (QC).

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This post 6 Negotiation Strategies to Use With Your Chinese Suppliers is from Web Retailer.

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How to Integrate with Amazon Vendor Using EDI

Amazon Vendor does not have an API, so retailers who want to integrate with the system have to get to grips with the obscure world of EDI

This post is by Katherine Khoo, Managing Director at ecommerce software development company Khoo Systems.

If you’re an Amazon Vendor (or a seller considering the Vendor program) the question of how to integrate with the system is likely to have come up. What does it take to connect with Amazon Vendor? And how does it work?

Amazon Vendor uses an interface called EDI (electronic data interchange) which allows you to extract order management data from Amazon Vendor. Unlike the Amazon marketplace and other common sales channels, Amazon Vendor does not have an API (application programming interface) so EDI is your only option.

In this post we’ll explore what EDI means, how it works for Vendors, and what it looks like technically.

To learn more about the Amazon Vendor program in general, see Amazon Vendor Central: Everything You Need to Know.

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What is EDI?

EDI (electronic data interchange) is a form of data exchange between a client and a server. In the case of Amazon Vendor, the EDI messages relate to the processing of purchase orders and invoices. 

In Amazon’s own words, the use of EDI is: 

Designed to take the normal business to business processes and accelerate and automate them to help reduce costs and improve efficiency as our companies interact.

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Support Better and Sell More with eDesk from xSellco

Customer support is a vital part of ecommerce, but it can be time-consuming and costly. eDesk is transforming that process.

Above: Ray Nolan, xSellco founder and CEO

One of the most time-consuming aspects to running an online business is customer support. It’s a buyers’ market, and consumers are more savvy than ever. They expect businesses to respond to their messages almost instantly and, if they don’t, they will shop elsewhere. 

But, if handled properly, customer service can be a business opportunity. Pre-sales contact can provide sellers with an opportunity to connect with potential customers and generate more sales.

xSellco has been developing software for multichannel sellers for eight years, and eDesk was created specifically to tackle the issues around customer service. Using artificial intelligence to generate automatic responses, eDesk can dramatically reduce response times, improving customer satisfaction and lowering the cost of support.

How did xSellco get started?

xSellco was founded by serial entrepreneur Ray Nolan. After many years in the travel industry, creating and chairing successful businesses like Hostelworld and Skyscanner, Ray caught wind of the burgeoning ecommerce scene.

The idea was sparked by a former colleague who had just dipped their toes into the online retail world. Ray noticed that he was struggling to manage data across different marketplaces, and was valiantly trying to stay on top of the issue with several different tools to handle all the different parts of the business. 

Many companies have built all-in-one software that aims to handle everything that ecommerce sellers need, but customer support is rarely a strong point for these systems.

Continue reading →

This post Support Better and Sell More with eDesk from xSellco is from Web Retailer.

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Make Your Amazon Business More Profitable With Benchmarking

Improve your financial education with these six steps to make your business leaner, faster, more competitive and more profitable

This post is by Jae Jun, a seven-figure amazon seller and founder of Gorilla ROI, software that connects Seller Central data to Google Sheets.

In this article, I’ll take you through the steps to analyze your profit margins and find benchmarks to make sure your business is running at optimal levels.

Using the methods I outline below, I was able to take our business from a low 30% gross profit range to 35-45% margins for many of our products.

This helped us break out from a sales plateau of $250k in revenue to over $2M in a few short years. Our sales continue to grow quickly today.

Let’s get into the details.

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Business is a competition.

You are competing against hundreds, if not thousands of similar products and sellers.

If you watch any cycling, racing, golf or sporting event, there are always leader packs that separate themselves from the rest of the competition.

The point of benchmarking is to keep up with the leader pack and not drop down the ranks.

But here’s the good news. Before I started implementing this mindset and process, our business was near the bottom, but in a few short years, our business became leaner, faster, focused, more competitive and more profitable.

This is all despite the fact that:

My products are priced below $15

My products are in competitive categories

I’ve been copied with prices racing to the bottom

Step #1: Clearly define your business model and objective

A big mistake I see with most small businesses is how they stumble around in the dark hoping to get from point A to point B.

Continue reading →

This post Make Your Amazon Business More Profitable With Benchmarking is from Web Retailer.

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The Best Inventory Management Software for Selling on Marketplaces

Manage your listings across multiple channels with the best ecommerce inventory management tools available, in four different categories.

This article contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, this can result in Web Retailer earning a commission. This does not affect the content of the article or the price you pay, and a full list of links is included at the end.

Whether you’re selling through your own store or on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, or somewhere else, there’s inventory management software that will work for you. Read on to discover the perfect tool to help you streamline your overheads, maximize your sales, and use every channel for your ecommerce advantage.

Here’s what you’ll find in this guide:

The best value all-rounder inventory management software. These tools provide a wide variety of features suitable for most marketplaces and listings, at a highly competitive price.

The best inventory management software for international selling. Learn about the tools best-suited for selling on marketplaces around the world.

The best inventory management software for U.S. marketplaces. If you need support for up-and-coming sales channels like Facebook Marketplace and Google Shopping Actions, as well as the more established marketplaces, this is where to look.

The best British inventory management software. The U.K. has a strong field of home-grown multichannel systems with excellent support for British marketplaces and parcel couriers.

Our top multichannel inventory management tools

Here are the best inventory management, multichannel tools for the four key areas we cover in this guide. 

CategoryOur Top PickWhat it doesPrice rangeBest value all-rounderEcomdashA good all round inventory management and listing tool with a wide variety of helpful, out-of-the-box features.

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This post The Best Inventory Management Software for Selling on Marketplaces is from Web Retailer.

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Amazon Sellers Need to Stop Dropshipping and Arbitrage. Here’s Why.

Amazon is now suspending sellers before their first sale, and requesting evidence of authenticity. Some sourcing models won’t survive.

This post is by Chris McCabe, owner and founder of ecommerceChris, LLC, an Amazon seller account consultancy.

Dropshippers and arbitrage sellers on Amazon can’t catch a break.

Things have changed in the last several months to make life even tougher for resellers trying to maintain a successful account. The number of sellers contacting me after they have been suspended due to a lack of adequate supply chain information has been multiplying every week.

We have tracked so many cases like this throughout 2019, that we now wonder why sellers continue to use these sourcing methods at all. Sellers like these, with weak supplier info or who lack invoices, need to modify their business models, and fast.

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Why does Amazon ask sellers for invoices and other sourcing information?

We’ve known for a long time now that Notice of Claimed Infringement teams have the job of protecting Amazon from legal liability, due to IP or counterfeit claims.

How do they do it? By demanding sourcing information from sellers, early and often. Buyer complaints of inauthenticity, however, aren’t the biggest trigger for these requests anymore. You should worry more about two other parties in the ecosystem: Amazon itself, and the brands that pester them to remove your listings.

Anyone who doesn’t have an invoice for items they have listed on the site now faces requests for very specific supplier information, and Amazon will quickly deny reinstatement if they don’t get it.

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3 Ecommerce Customer Service Hacks Every Seller Should Know

Reply templates, best practices and advanced hacks for three of the most common ecommerce customer support questions

This post is by Nadav Roiter, Marketing Manager for Subivi and a freelance journalist.

In this post I will show you how to deal with three common ecommerce customer questions as quickly as possible, while also providing excellent customer service.

These are the questions we’ll be looking at:

Do you combine shipping?

I haven’t received my package – where is it?

Do you have this item in stock?

You’ll learn how to reduce the time you spend dealing with these, and how you can transform ecommerce customer service from a time-consuming admin chore to an easy task that helps grow your business.

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1. Do you combine shipping?

Customers often wish to purchase more than one product from you and will check what effect this will have on the shipping costs.

Best practice: clearly state your shipping policies

The best practice, in this case, is to prepare a well-designed shipping policy which covers the company’s policies, including most of the scenarios where products can and can’t be “group shipped”.

The main benefits of having a clear and accessible shipping policy are:

Increases your brand reliability in the eyes of a prospective customer

Saves you valuable time by reducing future questions on this issue (99% of the information a client will need about shipping should appear in your policies)

Has the power to increase conversion rates and improve your bottom line, especially since confusion regarding shipping is one of the top causes of cart abandonment in ecommerce.

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Sourcing Products from India: An Alternative for Ecommerce Sellers?

As the trade war between U.S. and China pushes up prices for importers, online sellers should consider sourcing products from India.

This post is by Meghla Bhardwaj, an expert in sourcing products from India and China, and organizer of Global Sources Summit for ecommerce sellers.

While most private label ecommerce sellers buy products from China, an increasing number of sellers are exploring alternative markets such as India to diversify their business and minimize risks.

The import tariffs imposed by the U.S. on China-made products has further accelerated the need to look to look beyond China.

This article describes why sellers should import from India, what kind of products are manufactured there, and how to find suppliers.

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Why source products from India?

Here are some advantages ecommerce sellers have when buying products from India.

1. Unique, differentiated products

One of the main reasons to source from India is that the country specializes in producing unique and handcrafted products not found in other countries.

India suppliers focus on design and regularly develop and launch new products they have created in-house. Suppliers are very protective about their designs. At trade shows, exhibitors often won’t let buyers take photos of products in their booths.

There are also a wide range of indigenous handicraft styles that are unique to the country. For example, blue pottery from the state of Rajasthan, or cane and bamboo products made in the Eastern states of Assam, Meghalaya and Sikkim.

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This post Sourcing Products from India: An Alternative for Ecommerce Sellers? is from Ecommerce In Depth.

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Amazon Business: Your B2B Selling Questions Answered

Amazon Business is geared towards business buyers, with a number of features to meet their needs. Here’s everything sellers need to know.

Amazon has pretty much monopolized consumer-facing ecommerce – selling products to people for their personal use – but business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce is a whole different ball game. Some businesses have been buying from Amazon for years, but many larger companies have strict purchasing policies and Amazon has not been up to their standards.

In 2015, Amazon adapted its strategy to attract business buyers, through the new Amazon Business program. Businesses who wouldn’t buy from Amazon before could now access multi-user accounts, get quantity discounts and access detailed spending reports, along with other features.

As a result, Amazon quickly increased its market share of the huge B2B ecommerce market. In its first year, Amazon Business reached $1 billion in sales, with millions of buyers and hundreds of thousands of marketplace sellers trading through it. With total B2B ecommerce sales in the U.S. now over $1 trillion, there’s a lot more room for Amazon to grow from their 0.1% market share.

Here’s what Amazon Business is all about, and how to take advantage of the rapid growth in B2B ecommerce as a marketplace seller.

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What is Amazon Business?

Amazon Business is a B2B version of Amazon’s ecommerce platform. It is geared towards business customers who are looking for features like multiple users on one account, additional payment and credit options, and the usual Amazon benefits of low prices, wide selection and fast delivery.

Continue reading →

This post Amazon Business: Your B2B Selling Questions Answered is from Ecommerce In Depth.

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Improve Your eBay Customer Support With Subivi’s CRM System and Knowledge Hub

Subivi was built by former eBay sellers to take the pain out of customer support. Now they’re sharing their knowledge in The Subivi Times.

This post is by Nadav Roiter, Marketing Manager for Subivi and a freelance journalist.

Customer support forms such a huge part of the online shopping experience. Sellers that are nailing it with great customer service are reaping the rewards in the form of loyal fans and buyers that keep coming back for more.

Subivi is tapping into this important part of the ecommerce industry with a product that offers customer service automation features, so you can deal with customer questions as quickly as possible while still providing excellent support.

Co-Founder Michael Epstein-Lapid has also unveiled a new initiative called The Subivi Times. This is a knowledge hub with articles that inform and inspire ecommerce sellers looking to grow their business and increase profitability.

Here’s where Subivi came from, what it does, and what makes it different to the other ecommerce customer service tools out there. We also find out what makes The Subivi Times unique.

What is Subivi?

Subivi is an ecommerce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool that aims to streamline the customer service process and make it easier for sellers to answer buyer questions.

The tool integrates directly with eBay and Gmail, and provides a variety of features to help you manage customer support for all of your eBay accounts in one place.

Subivi uses automation features to ensure messages are customized and can upload return labels, issue refunds (full or partial) and update tracking numbers. Subivi is built to support all of eBay’s ticket types, including returns, item-not-received cases and order cancellations.

How does Subivi benefit sellers?

The main goal of Subivi is to make the customer support process streamlined, intuitive, and standardized, and its features all work together to make this possible. They include:

Automation – sellers with large order volumes can benefit from automated messages, quick replies with a variety of professional templates, and smart tags that autofill buyer and product information.

Analytics and insights – detailed reports on product trends help sellers target specific buyers with cross-selling and upselling strategies. For example, if a seller sees an increase in sales of vacation products, they can then use automated cross-selling or upselling messages to boost sales in that category.

Progressive web app – sellers can download an app to their phone so they can have access to their customer service dashboard wherever they are, whether it’s at the doctor’s office or picking up the kids from school.

Single-inbox approach – the all-in-one message center lets you close tickets, queries, and returns for all eBay accounts in one place. Sellers aren’t limited to the number of stores they can connect.

International expansion – a built-in translation tool supports translations in 100 different languages, which has allowed Subivi sellers to expand into a host of new countries. You can use the analytics feature to find your target market abroad and then tap into the translation element to create a one-stop-shop for anyone, anywhere.

Continue reading →

This post Improve Your eBay Customer Support With Subivi’s CRM System and Knowledge Hub is from Ecommerce In Depth.

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How to Win The Amazon Buy Box: Your Questions Answered

What is the Amazon Buy Box, how do sellers “win” it, what is Buy Box suppression, and how does the Buy Box algorithm work?

The Amazon Buy Box is an elegant way for Amazon to keep things simple for buyers, when multiple merchants are competing to sell the same product. Just one seller is highlighted, even when a product is being offered by dozens of different vendors.

Sellers need to know how to win the Buy Box, if they want to significantly boost their sales. Although the Buy Box seems simple on the surface, it hides a complex algorithm. This is what allows Amazon to run a marketplace with millions of sellers, but have one detail page for each particular product rather than a different page for every seller offering that product.

This article answers your questions on how the Buy Box works, the impact it has, what you can do to win it, and much more. You’ll learn to optimize your strategy to boost your share of the Buy Box, get into the rotation more often, and increase your revenue.

What is the Amazon Buy Box?

The Buy Box is a feature on Amazon that helps customers make purchases without needing to consider exactly who they are buying from – whether it’s Amazon themselves or a marketplace seller. It’s located at the top right of every Amazon product page.

Many products are available to buy from multiple Amazon sellers, so Amazon uses the Buy Box to select the “best” seller for each product. In the image above, EpicCo has “won” the Buy Box. This is also called being “in” the Buy Box or “owning” the Buy Box. It means that they are Amazon’s selected seller for this product, at this point in time.

When a customer clicks “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now”, the merchant who is in the Buy Box at that moment automatically wins the sale. The customer can expect Amazon to have chosen a seller who provides a competitive price, rapid delivery, strong customer service and various other factors that will help ensure their satisfaction.

Most sales on Amazon come through the Buy Box, so sellers who appear there regularly will make a lot more sales than those who are rarely featured. Over time, this can dramatically improve product sales.

Can sellers who are not in the Buy Box make any sales?

Below the Buy Box, you will find a box called “Other Sellers on Amazon”, whenever there is more than one seller of a particular product.

This is how merchants who are not in the Buy Box can gain some sales, but only if the buyer clicks the link to see the list of other sellers. Only a small proportion of sales on Amazon happen this way.

The Buy Box is even more important for customers buying on a smartphone, as it appears directly below the product image and price. The “other sellers” box on mobile browsers, and the Amazon app, is even less prominent than on computers with large screens.

Continue reading →

This post How to Win The Amazon Buy Box: Your Questions Answered is from Ecommerce In Depth.

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Alibaba Alternatives: 10 Other Ways to Source Products from China

When you’ve outgrown Alibaba, what are the alternatives for sourcing high-quality products from the best manufacturers in China?

This post is by Gary Huang, an expert in sourcing products from China and creator of 80/20 Sourcing.

When you think of sourcing from China, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Hopping on a plane and flying to Guangzhou to find a factory? No, you go on Alibaba!

Alibaba is very popular and accessible, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the best option. Why not? Well, it attracts a lot of middlemen and trading companies, and some of them aren’t upfront about that.

Alibaba is also where your competitors are likely to buy from, so you all might end up selling exactly the same products as them. Perhaps most importantly, some of the best suppliers avoid Alibaba – because they want to find a better class of customer!

So, what are the alternatives to Alibaba? I’ll explore them all here.

Why not Alibaba?

Everyone knows Alibaba is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. They have a celebrity CEO, millions of suppliers and products, and a huge campus in Hangzhou that rivals Google’s campus in Silicon Valley.

But all is not perfect in the land of Alibaba. Here’s why:

Quality. Alibaba has a broad range of suppliers but there are a lot of middlemen, trading companies, and bad apples. You have to work hard to find the good ones.

Diversification. If you are sourcing from the same supplier as your competitors, how will you differentiate yourself? You are likely to end up in a price war.

Choice. Many reliable suppliers purposely choose NOT to be on Alibaba. If you rely only on Alibaba, then you will never find them.

I’d like to show you ways to find Alibaba alternatives to help grow your business.

1. Global Sources

Global Sources has over 45 years’ experience in international trade. They offer an online directory of suppliers similar to Alibaba, and organize trade shows in Asia.

What’s the difference between Alibaba and Global Sources? Overall I feel the quality of suppliers on Global Sources is higher than those on Alibaba. They often have more experience in the export market, so they’re more likely to understand your needs. Also, you tend to find less suspicious factories than on Alibaba. In fact, many big-box stores use Global Sources as part of their sourcing strategy.

On the other hand, these suppliers expect more from you. Normally they will ask about your company background and your purchase volumes. It’s only fair that they want to see if you are the right fit for them. So, sourcing from Global Sources may take more initial work to build trust and get thorough replies from suppliers.

Many suppliers listed in Global Sources’ online directory also exhibit at their offline fairs, which adds to their credibility. They are willing to invest time and money into buying booth spaces, so have more skin in the game than an online middleman who can disappear overnight.

Continue reading →

This post Alibaba Alternatives: 10 Other Ways to Source Products from China is from Ecommerce In Depth.

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eBay and MPNs, UPCs and EANs: All Your Questions Answered

The need for product identifiers on eBay has left sellers confused. What do they mean and how do they benefit sellers, buyers, and eBay?

MPNs, UPCs, EANs, GTINs, ePIDs… selling on eBay is starting to feel like swimming through alphabet soup!

Over the past few years, the platform has introduced a number of different initiatives to make shopping easier and more efficient for its customers.

To do this, eBay has been asking sellers in many categories to add “product identifiers” to their listings. That’s where all the acronyms come in, including MPNs, UPCs and several others. These codes help eBay display relevant products to shoppers and encourage search engines like Google to place eBay listings higher in the results.

But sellers are confused by all the different product identifiers. Which ones are required and which ones are optional? Is it beneficial for sellers to play ball with the new rules, or is it better to try and work around them? And, perhaps most pressingly, what is the purpose of all this anyway?

What’s been happening with eBay and product identifiers?

The saga of eBay’s product identifiers has been full of ups and downs.

Back in 2015, eBay was all set to roll out mandatory product identifiers in many categories, but just before the implementation was supposed to take place, they realized there was a problem with variation listings and delayed it until the following year.

When 2016 came round, eBay started talking about structured data and announced it would allow Amazon ASINs, Google product identifiers, and even sellers’ own product identifiers on listings. They would also stop allowing “does not apply” and “NA” as an opt-out from product identifiers for most items.

More problems took hold in 2017, when eBay delayed mandatory product identifiers across many parts of the world.

In 2018, eBay started talking more about the eBay catalog and said it would become mandatory for sellers to use this catalog in some categories, as well as product identifiers. Lo and behold, this was reversed in 2019 when eBay announced that sellers didn’t actually have to associate items with the eBay catalog in order to reap the benefits of the latest buzz-phrase: product-based shopping experience.

Throughout this twisting tale, sellers have reported bugs such as listings being ended for not having identifiers, even when they did have them, incorrect or inconsistent information from eBay seller support reps, and many other problems.

What’s the difference between GTINs, EANs, UPCs, ISBNs, ePIDs and MPNs?

eBay is full of acronyms, particularly when it comes to product identifiers. You’d easily be forgiven for getting these mixed up and, while some of these acronyms mean pretty much the same thing, others mean something else entirely.

GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)

This is an identifier for products, developed and maintained by a not-for-profit organization called GS1. The funding for GS1 comes from large retailers and brands around the world.

GTINs are issued to manufacturers, retailers and other organizations, for a fee, and the purpose is to provide a unique code to look up product information in a database.

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This post eBay and MPNs, UPCs and EANs: All Your Questions Answered is from Ecommerce In Depth.

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