Your Product ID never expires, but sometimes you have to change it.
By Vanessa Hung · September 5, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
Your Product ID never expires, but sometimes you have to change it.
A seller who reads my newsletter list reached out this week, , they have been on Amazon since 2020, and they still have a couple of ASINs running on barcodes bought from a reseller back then, now that they use GS1 for everything else, they wanted to know if changing the old ones was as simple as editing a field.
Before answering that, it helps to separate two things people tend to blend into one.
A manufacturer barcode, like a UPC or EAN, is the identifier tied to the product itself, the same one that shows up on packaging in a retail store, and it stays with the product no matter who sells it.
A GS1-certified UPC is simply the legitimate version of a manufacturer barcode, purchased directly from GS1, the actual standards body, instead of resold through a third party, and this distinction is what determines whether Amazon can verify the product at all.
I told them what I tell every seller who asks this, Amazon does not check a UPC once at listing creation and forget about it, it checks continuously against the GS1 database, so a barcode that has been working for years can still get flagged the moment Amazon runs another pass and finds no match.
The thing is that Amazon says that once an ASIN has FBA inventory attached, you cannot just swap the UPC on that listing, the identifier is locked to the SKU (wrong, there is an actual way).
And this is exactly the kind of issue where doing it yourself can cost more time than it saves, between identifying which ASINs are exposed, sourcing the correct GS1 UPC, and structuring the SKU migration without disrupting active listings, it is easy to introduce a new problem while fixing the old one.
At Online Seller Solutions we handle this end-to-end, so you can stay focused on running your business while we make sure the catalog side is done right: https://lnkd.in/eYBurKGa
🩵 If this sounds like a conversation you have had too, hit like.
♻️ If you know someone still holding onto old reseller barcodes, send them this post.
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