The benefit of purchasing your own EAN numbers…

By Sharon Fussell, March 19, 2015

I’m often on the look out for new and different products to sell on Amazon. Used books are obviously great, as are other types of media, but it’s good to keep an eye out for other types of products that will render a profit.

There are several ways of doing this and I dabble with the purchasing of pallets of returned goods, A grade and otherwise, and bulk-buying items at auction.

Now, the issue with this type of buying is that it is usually ‘blind’, in that you are not really sure what quality of goods you are going to receive.

I do admit that it can be a little scary waiting to see what you have bought and if it’s re-saleable!

In most cases most items are, and like most bulk buying, the items that can be sold will make up for items that cannot or do not sell, for whatever reason.

Recently we purchased a pallet of education products: games and other materials that we thought would provide synergy with books and media that we already sell online.

The pallet contained A grade products, all factory wrapped, and the goods were produced by a leading brand.

Along with language games and maths type products, there were 178 bags of counting cubes. There were not EANs or bar codes with the products: we had absolutely no idea how we were going to sell them and, of course, if there would be any demand for them.

We had visions of chucking them out. However, we noted on Amazon that there was a similar product that had very good sales ranking, obviously in great demand.

However, the product, although similar, is significantly different to not enable us to list our product on the same page.

We were in a quandary on how we could sell them on Amazon…

We are happy to state that we did find a way and, to date, sales of this product are going well and selling quite profitably too.

We have estimated the entire cost of purchasing the pallet of goods will be at least doubled, just from selling this one product – never mind the hundreds of other items on the pallet.

Happily, slowly but surely, various other items from the pallet are also selling: they are quite niche so its not feasible they will sell very quickly.

So, how did we overcome the issue of listing a product with no barcode or EAN number?

First we purchased an EAN number online: we were very surprised how cost-effective these numbers are, costing around 4 euros.

We also listed on eBay, where actually you can list items without EAN numbers or barcodes, and two selling forums are better than one!

If you produce your own crafts or goods it might be a good idea to ensure you can sell on Amazon by purchasing your own EAN number. You can only use one number per product, but if you produce several of the same items over and over, it’s probably very worthwhile to purchase your own EAN number.

Also, if you fancy buying a pallet of goods or attending an auction, you might well find great bargains that for the sake of purchasing an EAN number will increase your income!