Never Reuse UPC/GTIN/EAN Barcodes

Today’s priority is creating 12 new listings for one of the accounts I’m managing. As soon as I had all the details ready–i.e. product title, description, bullet points, and search terms–I created a feed file. Everything was filled out correctly, not missing any required information, so in my mind, this would be an easy task. But when did Amazon becomes easy? Never.

Anyway, 8 out of 12 listings were created successfully. The other 4? I got error 8541 which meant that the SKU data provided is different from what’s already in the Amazon catalog. Encountering this error is surprising to say the least because these SKUs are completely new and never been listed on Amazon. So I opened a case with Seller Support hoping to get the issue resolved sooner than later. However, Seller Support confirmed that the UPC/GTIN/EAN barcodes for these 4 SKUs have been used previously but the associated ASINs were discontinued. And that’s when I realized that, indeed, I used these barcodes for other products but ended up only listing but not actually launching these products.

To make the story short, never reuse UPC/GTIN/EAN barcodes even if you end up not using it commercially. Once you list anything on Amazon, it will stay in the system indefinitely.

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