If you're stuck or confused by UPCs and FNKSUs, you are NOT alone.  I've noticed a ton of people getting hung up on these.  So this episode is my attempt to clear up some of the confusion. We're going to dive deep into some basics here to get an understanding of what the barcodes are and what you need to do with them.

The transcript is below, but if you'd like to leave a comment, head over to http://brandingblitz.com/5/

Hey everybody, welcome back! This is JR and you're listening to the Branding Blitz podcast where I'll take you behind the scenes as I go through the process of trying to strategically use speed and brute force to launch and scale a new brand.

This is episode 5 and today I'm going to discuss a topic that seems to be a hang up for a lot of people.

I quit using Facebook back in January – when my health started falling apart, I simply didn't have the energy to invest in it. I got back on again this week for two reasons. First, I wanted to look into setting up a page to help promote my new brand. But I also wanted to join up with some of the Facebook groups where people are discussing Amazon FBA and private labeling – primarily I was interested in the one Scott Voelker set up to build a community around The Amazing Seller podcast, but there are a handful of others I joined too.

So after months of avoiding Facebook, Scott Voelker got me back on it – I'm still not sure if I should thank him for that or not, but there is an active community there with a lot of valuable information being discussed. But there was something I noticed very quickly. There are certain questions that seem to get asked quite frequently.

One of those issues in particular I've noticed being asked at least 2-3 times a day over the past few days. It seems every several hours someone asks some form of the following questions: Do I need a UPC code? Where do I get it? Does the manufacturer provide the UPC code? Does the manufacturer put the UPC code on there or do I? Do I need to put the UPC code and the FNSKU? What's and FNSKU and where do I get it? What's the difference between a UPC and an FNSKU? Do I need to register my UPC code?

There's probably a dozen or so different questions you could ask along those lines, but ultimately, this is what is really being ask: Can someone PLEASE help me understand this confusing mess of acronyms and barcodes?

I think I've got it sorted out, so I wanted to put together an episode explaining the details as a resource to anyone trying to figure out what they need to do.

So that's the topic of this episode titled: “Alphabet Soup: UPC, FNSKU, SMH, IDK, TGIF”

I think most of the difficulty stems from not understanding the basics of what barcodes are, what a UPC is and how they're used and how that differs from an FNSKU. So we're going to start with some basic explanations which should help make everything clearer when we get to discussing the practical application.

So first off – what is a barcode? Probably the first thing that pops into most people's head is the black and white set of lines and numbers you see on the back of every product on every shelf of any major retail store. But that is a specific type of barcode – it's a UPC barcode.

But a barcode can be used for other things too. If you look at your computer case, it likely has a barcode with a serial number on it and maybe a product key as well. Your car may have a barcode on the dash or door for the VIN number. When UPS delivers your package, it has a barcode. And as I've recently discovered, when you check in to a hospital or ER, the little bracelet they give you may have a barcode.

All that is to say, when we hear the word “barcode” something very specific tends to come to mind, but the actual term barcode refers to a system of turning information into a code made up of lines or bars so that it can be easily read by an optical scanner. We're trained to read text, so the lines don't mean much to us, but for a computer using very basic optics, it is much easier for it to interpret lines than letters.

Barcodes have actually expanded beyond basic black and white lines to other formats which can hold more information within the code – but for the purposes of this discussion just think of a barcode as an alphabet that is easier for a computer to understand.

Then what's a UPC code? UPC stands for Universal Product Code, and this is what you see on any product you pick up in Walmart. The numbers at the bottom are the human readable version of the UPC and the black lines are what you get when you translate those numbers into that special alphabet I mentioned.

In theory, each of those sets of numbers is unique to an individual product. So when you get to the cash register, instead of the cashier having to look up the product by name in their computer or type in the price manually, they can flash that set of bars in front of their scanner and the computer can quickly figure out that 037000195221 is a tube of toothpaste.

We'll talk more about the UPC, where you get it, and how to use it in a minute, but first let's talk about the FNSKU. What is that?

Well, barcodes aren't just used at the cash register, they're also very useful in warehouses. Imagine you've got warehouse with hundreds of thousands of products in it. You get a sheet of paper with a bunch of product names on it and you're supposed to go find those product and box them up to ship out.

Let's get even more specific – let's say one of the products on that list is that same toothpaste we talked about earlier. I just searched on Amazon for “toothpaste” and it showed 13 pages of results. So that's hundreds of different toothpaste varieties. So imagine I direct you to the “toothpaste” section of Amazon's warehouse, and tell you to find the four pack of 6 ounce tubes of Crest Pro-Health Whitening Fresh Clean Mint toothpaste. Now, be sure not to confuse that with the six pack of 4.2 ounce tubes of Crest Pro-Health Clean Mint toothpaste – a totally different product.

This is where barcodes come in – instead of you sitting there trying to verify you've got the right thing saying to yourself, “Wait was it the 4 pack or 6 pack?” “Oops this is 4.2 ounce tubes, I needed the 6 ounce tubes.” “Wait this one isn't the special 'whitening' version, I need that version.” You can just scan the barcode and the computer will interpret that code and verify that it's the right thing.

So far all of this could be done with the regular UPC barcodes, but Amazon faces another issue that compounds the complexity of this. Imagine now that you not only have to find that specific type of toothpaste amidst all the others – but there are 7 different companies selling that toothpaste all stored in your warehouse and you want to make sure you send out a product from the correct set of inventory. Well, if everyone selling that toothpaste has is using the same UPC barcode, then you don't have any way of telling them apart, so you've got two options.

You could just pile everyone's inventory into the same bin and send them without differentiating between who the inventory actually belongs to – this is an option you can use on Amazon and it probably would be the right option for this toothpaste example, but for a lot of products that isn't ideal, so Amazon needed another option. This is where the FNSKU comes from.
The FNSKU is a set of letters and numbers that identifies a unique product just like the UPC does – but the FNSKU also contains information linking it to a specific seller.

When Amazon needs to be able to tell something is your product specifically, they will require it to have an FNSKU barcode on it. And to make things easier on them, they actually require that the UPC barcode that would generally be on the packaging either be replaced or covered so that only the FNSKU barcode is scannable.

At this point, you might be thinking - “Alright JR, that's great, I now know way more than I ever wanted to about barcodes – but I still have no idea how to apply all this to my product.” Well, let's talk about that a bit.

Since we know that it is eventually going to be replaced or covered up, a logical question is, “Do I even need a UPC or can I just use the FNSKU?”

Every product you list on Amazon will need to have a UPC before you can create the listing. In fact if you have variations, such as offering the same product in multiple colors, each one will need it's own UPC. That said, depending on how you decide to move forward with what you're learning here, you may not actually need the barcode itself – just the set of numbers. You need to type in the numbers from the UPC when you are registering the product on Amazon and that may be the last time you ever think about that UPC.

Knowing that you have to have a UPC code for your product and in the end the only scannable bardcode needs to be the FNSKU, you've got about 3 options on how to proceed.

One of the most common options for people starting out is simply to have Amazon put a sticker on your product with the FNSKU on it. This is an easy and hands-off way to get started. I think it is popular because all the different barcodes can be confusing and you don't have to understand ins and outs of all of this to take this route – you just let Amazon handle it. So if you're still feeling confused at the end o