#475 – GS1 Q&A, GTIN Hijacking, & Barcode FAQs

Video of the episode at the bottom

In the world of e-commerce and retail, barcodes play a crucial role in product identification and inventory management. But what lies beyond those familiar lines and numbers? Join us as we dive into the fascinating world of barcodes with an exclusive interview with Michelle Covey, a leading expert from GS1 US.
 
Michelle shares insights into her current endeavors and sheds light on the latest innovations in barcodes. We discuss whether Walmart adheres to the same GTIN requirements as other retailers and explore the concept of GTIN hijacking scenarios. For Amazon sellers, we uncover strategies to avoid GTIN problems. Additionally, we address the varying pricing ranges of GS1 licenses across different countries and provide guidance for those who purchased second-hand barcodes. Tune in for an informative and engaging discussion!
 
If you’re interested to learn more, here are additional resources talked about in this episode and provided by GS1 US:

• Homepage – https://www.gs1us.org/
• Estimate How Many GTINs You Need – https://www.gs1us.org/tools/barcode-estimator/home
• GS1 US Podcast – https://next-level-supply-chain-with-gs1us.podcastpage.io/

In episode 475 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Michelle discuss:

• 01:39 – What Is Michelle Up To These Days?
• 02:24 – Is There Innovation In Barcodes?
• 03:03 – Does Walmart Have Same GTIN Requirements?
• 06:05 – GS1 US Answers All Your Burning Questions!
• 07:53 – What Is A GTIN Hijacking Scenario
• 09:50 – How To Avoid GTIN Problems With Amazon
• 13:13 – Why Amazon Does Not Like Barcodes Outside GS1 Or Resellers
• 14:00 – Why GS1 Have Different Pricing Ranges For Other Countries?
• 16:09 – What If I Bought Second-Hand Barcode?
• 18:10 – What GS1 Barcode Or GTIN Fields Does Amazon Look At?
• 20:31 – What Are GS1 License Owner Certificates?
• 21:35 – Does A Brand Name Change Need A New GTIN?
• 23:28 – Common Error Messages Amazon Sellers Get From Their Barcodes
• 25:24 – Always Think About Your Packaging Strategy
• 27:30 – Upcoming GS1 Barcode Innovations
• 29:43 – Michelle’s Healthy Habits And Habits Outside Work
• 31:20 – How To Reach Out To GS1 US & Michelle Covey

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

If you’re a serious seller, you know you need an official barcode from GS1. But there’s error messages that come up here and there, and questions about what Amazon can really see from GS1 and other concerns. So we actually invited an official rep from GS1 to answer all these questions. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you afraid of running out of inventory before your next shipment comes in? Or maybe you’re on the other side and you worry about having too much inventory, which could cap you out at the Amazon warehouses, or even cost you storage fees? Stay on top of your inventory by using our robust inventory management tool. You can take advantage of our advanced forecasting algorithms, manage your three PL inventory, create pos for your suppliers, create replenishment, shipments, and more. All from inside inventory management by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me/inventorymanagement. And don’t forget, you can sign up for a free Helium 10 account from there, or you can get 10% off for life by using our special podcast code SSP10. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And back for the second time, we’ve got somebody who indirectly helps millions of sellers out there potentially. Michelle from GS1. How’s it going?

Michelle:

It’s going great. Thank you for having me today, Bradley.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. Now we’re not gonna go too much into your backstory this time. If you guys are interested, make sure to check out episode 357. All right, so episode 357 was the first time that she was on the podcast. And we talked about, you know, the history of, of GS1, and we talked a lot about some, some basics, you know, like what’s the difference between GTIN and EIN and a whole bunch of cool stuff. But I wanted to just, first of all, just what have you been up to? Like, how’s the last couple years been since you’ve been on the show?

Michelle:

Well, you know, always busy. I think there’s always plenty of work to do. And I’ve changed roles. I’m now in our innovation team, so, but I still help support a lot of the Amazon community, but I’m also working–

Bradley Sutton:

All right, hold on. I gotta ask. Barcodes are barcodes. How do you innovate that? That sounds like a really tough job to have. Like, all right, barcodes are completely set now. We need you to innovate something cool.

Michelle:

No, you could always innovate. I think that, well, we can take that discussion too, but like where industry is going with barcodes, you’ve seen the linear barcode on your products. They’ve been around for 50 years and they’ve been working great, but you start to see 2D barcodes, QR codes on things why not make that the barcode that goes beep up the checkout stand? So we’ve been working on that too. So yeah, I can talk more about that if you want.

Bradley Sutton:

Now that you mentioned that I saw something interesting the other day. It was like these crazy, I’ve seen, you know, QR codes that have some like logos, you know, embedded in it, but now it’s like, looks like art, but it’s really a bar. Like it’s really a QR code. I’m like, how is that even possible? But okay. There is innovation barcodes, I guess. There probably wasn’t for, for a few decades, but now, now we’re getting back back there. You know, right, right before the call, you know, you had mentioned Walmart, and so I just want, you know, let’s just start off there. One thing that’s interesting, you know, about you know, when we’re talking about barcodes, I know just from my limited experience, you know, obviously on Amazon, you know, I have tons of experience. I usually actually put an FNSKU, obviously everything needs a GS1 barcode, you know, for the backend. But I put the Amazon FNSKU sticker you know, over it when I send it to Amazon. But when it comes to Walmart, it’s actually the opposite. Now I have to actually cover up, if I had, like, if I had printed my Amazon FNSKU I actually have to cover it up with the original UPC. Now,

Bradley Sutton:

What is your experience like, you know, like do you, do you see a lot more sellers you know, selling on, on Walmart? And does Walmart have the same kind of very strict rules like Amazon does about the GS1?

Michelle:

So, good questions. I think, and this is something we always talk about when we are talking to the seller community, especially new companies that are just starting out. First of all, always identify your product with the GS1 GTIN that global trade item number, that’s what gets encoded into the barcode. So we talk more about GTIN but again, if you look into listen to that pressed episode, we, we interchange ’em with barcodes very quickly. But so get your, your number. And that’s what’s used on Amazon, but it’s also used on Walmart. So Walmart has the same GTIN requirements for identifying your product. But their barcode requirements are the traditional GS1 barcode. So having that UPC barcode, or if you did assign an EIN, that EIN barcode to your product, so they want that one to go, you know, beef at the checkout. Amazon doesn’t really have, in most cases, a traditional checkout. Everything’s done on the marketplace. And so they use that FNSKU for like their just fulfillment process in their warehouse.

Michelle:

Yeah. Okay. But for most part, we always say, you know, again, sellers usually start on Amazon and don’t think about it, and they’ll just do the FNSKU and then they won’t think about, well, if I am expanding into other channels, I now need this other barcode. So it is a challenge. We’re hoping that Amazon will use more GS1 barcodes in their fulfillment center because it does cause that dichotomy among how you, you know, barcode your products, whether it’s for Amazon or for most other traditional retailers that use the GS1 system.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, personally, I have never applied for a GTIN exemption, you know, to get, I mean, like, I just don’t understand the, the point, like even if I’m not selling on other marketplaces, it’s like, to me it’s just a no-brainer. Would you agree with that? I mean, people might say you’re biased here, but why do you, is it just laziness that some people don’t want want to get a, a barcode or that’s being cheap, or what?

Michelle:

It could be. So there are a couple of reasons why a GTIN exemption or seller seeks GTIN exemptions. One is if you do have a generic product or you label your product generic, right now, currently Amazon does not allow you to have a generic product with a GTIN. However, that’s changing soon. So we do know that they’re, you know, cuz in the standards you can actually have a GTIN associated to a generic product. So they’re working to change that. So we’re really excited that they’re understanding the use of our standards. So that’s one category that we’ve seen the GTIN exemptions, generics other ones could be laziness. Yeah, it could be. We’ve also seen it in high SKU intensity, like in the apparel sector where they have, you know, runs of a hundred thousand different types of t-shirts that could be all customized, that’s a lot of GTINs to assign and maybe not every one of them will be purchased. And so, you know, why, why spend that money on it? So that we’ve seen that case too trying to come up with some solutions for those categories. But ideally, of course I’m biased. I would always say assign a GTIN to your product.

Bradley Sutton:

Sure. Yeah. Alright. I mean, I’m not biased and that’s what I would say <laugh>.

Michelle:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

I actually, you know, there, there are some questions from some of our users, you know, when they found out that I was going to, you know, go ahead and have you back on the show. And, and, and Jay you know, who’s actually been on this podcast before, he was wondering about what’s the latest as far as like catalog corrections made when, like, let’s say the ASIN is showing the incorrect brand, but the UPC is assigned to your brand or no, aligned to your brand. So I’m not sure if I understand that question, but looks like maybe there’s a product that has the wrong brand but has the right UPC, you know, like is does, is GS1 gonna provide any help? Like, does, can Amazon see that, you know, if if it was a GS1 barcode, can Amazon see that it’s assigned to a certain brand in GS1? And then maybe that will help you know, make the transition.

Michelle:

So I think what you’re explaining is what we call a GTIN hijacking scenario. Where you go to list your own product, you own it or, and you have the GTIN associated and then it’s already on the platform.

Bradley Sutton:

If that’s what he meant, then yeah, that I exactly know what that is. It’s happened to me before. Okay. So, so how do you, what’s your suggestion on?

Michelle:

So the best way that, you know, we’ve been working with Amazon selling partner support to try to help sellers through that because it can get very tricky. So if you are the, the rightful owner of your GS1 GTIN what we recommend is, first of all, when hopefully you know, or the reason why it might be out there is it was on the platform a lot longer before Amazon started doing some of the checks against the GS1 database. So we’ve seen that. Because right now, anytime a new GTINs listed, it does check against our database to ensure that that company is associated to that GTIN. So

Bradley Sutton:

What does it mean by like associated? Like what if I have multiple brands, it let’s say I have two, or let’s say I have three companies, you know, obviously with, with you know, GS1, you know, I’m one company, but let’s say on Amazon, you know, I might have three or four accounts, you know, each of them have four different accounts or four different brands or something. If they’re all in the same GS1 account, does that count as, you know, being, I forgot what the word you used related or whatever, or do I need separate GS1 accounts as well?

Michelle:

You don’t need separate GS1 accounts. Now the, this is where it does get tricky cuz you think about like some of the large multinationals, like Coca-Cola, everybody knows Coca-Cola, right? The company is Coca-Cola Company, however, they have multiple brands. They have Diet Coke, Coke, Coke Zero. So they’ll have a whole list of brands. Now, unfortunately we don’t store at GS1, we don’t store all the brands associated to that company. So I think what you’re saying is how does Amazon know that I have Diet Coke, Coke, Coke Zero, all that. That is upon the brand to submit that to Amazon. So they have a like a brand authorization form that they’ll ask new sellers to provide so that they have listed out all the brands that they are authorized to sell. We’re working with Amazon to try to figure out how to help provide that data. But Amazon is looking for that brand level information from directly from the sellers. Right now, unfortunately we don’t, at GS1 don’t collect all that brand information too. So we collect the company name Coca-Cola Company and then your license, but we don’t collect all that brand information and share that with Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, because I was, I’m just thinking, you know, like in my personal experience, I have like a GS1 UK account and I use it for our, you know, helium 10 products, which is called Project X’s Reality TV show that we did on YouTube a couple years ago. But then I also use that same account for the GS1 account to, to make barcodes for some of my other, you know, personal Amazon accounts and, and other people’s Amazon accounts that I, or not other people’s, but you know, other accounts I have full control over. Now I haven’t had any issues, you know, on the Amazon side, so is it maybe because Amazon has already tied, you know, these different accounts to that same, you know, GS1 will say, okay, it’s using the same, you know, prefix and and it’s obviously coming from the same account. Is that why I’m not having issues or It

Michelle:

Could be, it could be. And it could be that your brand, so you are using only your, your brand. There’s cases where third party sellers can be selling same brand. So two or two or three people can be selling the same brand. And so how does Amazon know which seller is authorized to sell that brand? Cuz some may or may not be able to. So in those cases, especially the third party sellers, if they’re not a first party seller, then they might have to submit this brand authorization form, if that makes sense.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. All right. Sounds good. Another question from Jay, and this is just, you know, I was gonna ask this myself too, but still pretty much the same, where like, Hey, Amazon does not want anybody buying barcodes not from GS1, like from, you know, resellers that that’s still gonna be a, a chance to get you in trouble, right?

Michelle:

Yeah, again, they do check that license information against the GS1 database and they, they are pretty firm with that. You know, I’ve, I’ve heard other cases where I’ve had it before again, before they started making these checks against the GS1 database some of these GTIN s were allowed on the platform, or maybe they weren’t true GS1 GTINs, but they are definitely staying firm with it must come from GS1.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. You know, a few people are just curious, like why different GS1 offices have have such different pricing structures. So like, are you guys pretty much different entities or does one have more value? Like does one have more power than, than the other? Or more value as opposed to you know, we’re talking about, you know, databases in Amazon, et cetera, or what, what’s going on there?

Michelle:

We get that question a lot. So if you’re not familiar with GS1 or if you don’t wanna go back and listen to that other episode, just a real, real quick recap. GS1 is a global company as far as we have global standards and we manage them in each local region through local offices. So GS1 us, GS1, uk, GS1, Germany, GS1, Brazil and each of those offices, while we all help administer the standards, we do all operate independently. So we all have different business models. So it’s kind of like a federated model across the, the globe. We all help administer the exact same standard but in each region different business models. So yes, you’ll run into different pricing structures. You might also run into different bundled offerings or support offerings in each region.

Michelle:

So why, why would you go to one over the other generally in your local region, you’d go to your local office. So in the US, GS1 US supports the local office we have in, in-language support and in time zone support. So some, you said you have some accounts for GS1 UK. They may not have, correct. I mean, they actually are an English speaking country, but if you were needing support and it was, you know, your three o’clock in the morning, that’s when you could get them. But maybe not at your, you know, four o’clock in the afternoon. So it just depends on where you want your support and maybe some of their offerings. But it’s up to you, it’s up to, you could go to any GS1 office to get your GTIN s. It’s just, you know, you make those decisions on language support, you know, customer support and possibly other service offerings.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Another question that somebody had here was, let’s say, you know, there’s somebody who didn’t know any better and then got one of the, the these secondhand, you know, from eBay or somewhere else or what they thought was a reputable website, a GS1 or a bar a barcode or UPC and they want to get compliant, you know, cuz maybe they’re scared that Amazon might shut them down or something. Like what should they do? You know, that they’ve got an Amazon listing, it’s already tied to this shady UPC code. Is there anything they could do to become not shady?

Michelle:

Well, you know, so Amazon is going back and doing, not only are they checking on initial listing they are starting to go back and clean up bad data or data that’s not authentic GS1. So you might might be a seller that have been on the platform for a while with a non GS1 GTIN and be asked to update it. So we’ve seen that. We do find it’s actually tricky if you are one of those sellers that has a non GS1 and you’re like, out of the goodness of my heart, I wanna update this to a GS1 GTIN. I’ll be honest, I don’t think Amazon has a very good standard operating procedure for that to help sellers do that. Because when you do switch it over, it doesn’t carry some of your customer reviews, you know, all of the, the stats that you want it to. Very easy. I know that they’re working on a process to make that easier for sellers to do that changeover. But from my understanding, it’s still pretty tricky to do that in the, in the middle of, you know, a listing that’s already active and then also if you have inventory in stock in their warehouse that causes an issue. So there’s a lot of complications. So it’s not a quick yes, do it. There’s a lot of considerations to, to be made before you actually do that.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, now, you know, if we’ve done the right thing and, and we do have GS1 account and, and, and we’re, we’re doing, we’re, you know, generating new UPC codes, the, the right way, you know, setting it up on Amazon, et cetera. You know, what exactly is Amazon looking at from GS1? Like what’s the fields that are important or what, what are the ones where, hey, don’t, don’t worry too much about it. You know, like, I’m assuming that they’re not going down to the very SKU level or manufacturer SKU field inside, you know, when we’re creating a GS1 barcode, but, you know, are is the most important thing the you know, what company we use to register with that we make it our brand or what, what is actually Amazon looking at when they’re verifying information from GS1?

Michelle:

So they have a lot of like proprietary scripts. So some of it I’m not too aware of cuz they do have their own algorithms, but the, the fields that they use from GS1 that they check on the database is your company name. So like, again, I’m gonna go back to the Coca-Cola example. Coca-Cola Company Inc. So they’ll look at your company name, they’ll look at your prefix or your license. Cuz at GS1 US, we also license single GTIN. So it could either be your prefix or even your single gtin. And ensure that that the identifiers you are adding to your listing match your range within your prefix that’s assigned to your company or your single GTIN. They do look at brand name, but again, they don’t collect that from GS1.

Michelle:

So they kind of marry it together and then use that brand name for a validation as well. And then going through the rest of the listing process, there might be some other errors that come up. Again, I think I told you, if you’re now then listing for a generic, it’ll check and see, oh, does it have a GTIN or not? You know, and it may throw an error or not. So there are some other checks along the way. And then of course, you know, they do all other checks not necessarily against GS1 data, but like, you know, you know, the product descriptions are right or, you know, they have other fields that they check. But from a GS1 perspective, it’s the company name and the license and oh, and the address of the company.

Bradley Sutton:

Now this has never happened to me, but I know I’ve heard or I’ve seen in like message boards or something where sometimes maybe there’s an error, you know, Amazon says, Hey, no, this is not your, your, you know, the right GS1 or something, or the right you know, UPC, you need to submit something to prove it is, or maybe there is something that you could submit. So what would I be going to GS1 and printing off or something to, to show Amazon that, hey, I’m legit.

Michelle:

So for each identifier, you’re, you license for GS1 you get a license owner certificate, so a prefix certificate or even a single GTIN certificate. So at GS1 us, you log into your my GS1 US account, print your certificate, and that shows your company name with your g your prefix and or your GTIN. And it also gives you we also assign a, what we call a GLN, a global location number, which is basically that that ties to that address and that submit, if you submit that into selling partner support, that proves your ownership.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. Cool. Elizabeth here has a question. She says, can I keep the same barcode g gtin if I switch brands, keep selling the same product and rebrand it? Somebody had told me that I have to create a new login entirely with a new brand and get a new barcode. So it sounds like maybe she’s been selling, you know, let’s just say she’s selling this water bottle under, what is this Takea brand, right? and she’s still gonna sell this water bottle, but now she wants to, you know, to, to change it to select bottles in cor you know, select bottles brand or something like that. What responsibility does she have, if any, on the barcode side you know, maybe on Amazon, everything say the same, same ASIN and, and things like that. Does she have to do anything differently now that it’s a new brand?

Michelle:

Yeah, that’s a good question. So anytime your product changes materially so a brand name change would require a new gtin because you’d also think about it too, from a sales perspective and tracking sales. You would wanna know which brand sells better than the other. You could do that. But from a GS1 standards perspective, yes, as a product, if your brand changes, if an image on your package changes, if if the contents change significantly, if your net weight changes there’s a couple of other things, but you know, if even if you printed it in English and, and you also sold it in Spanish, you know, if you have two different types of packages, you’d want two different GTIN.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. We touched on this a little bit earlier, but what are some, you know, I know we touched on it last episode, but you know, things change in in a couple of years. What are the, you know, some common error messages that Amazon sellers are getting these days? As far as you know, when it comes to their, their UPC,

Michelle:

There’s like two or three as it relates to GS1 data. One of the first ones when you first go in to enter, like the very first question on the listing is what is your product identifier? And then there’s a dropdown, and it’s GTIN, UPC, EIN, there’s a couple others ISBN that one always confuses people because we’ve confused people. We call ’em GTIN s. But then you know, when you get a 12 digit, it’s actually associated to the UPC barcode. Again, go back to your Previ s episode. So if you’re entering the 12 digit, you’re actually supposed to select UPC instead of GTIN. If you have a 13 digit identifier that gets encoded to the EIN, select that one or the 14 digit is actually the GTIN.

Michelle:

So that one always trips people up because, you know, GS1 calls ’em GTINs, but then we also interchange them with UPCs and stuff. So that’s one of ’em. And then again, if it’s a GTIN hijacking that, that says this product already exists on your, on Amazon, but you are like thinking this is the very first time you’ve entered it, it’s probably a GTIN hijacking. So again, providing your certificate to selling partner support saying this is truly my GTIN. And they could help you clear that. We do find that if you write the words, especially if you’re submitting a case online, write the words GTIN hijack or hijacking the, their algorithm sends it to the proper queue. So that’s been a tip that we’ve heard works and we’ve heard also internally from the selling partner support team put that word in there and gets ’em to the right queue versus other words in your list, in your case. And then again, the, the generic that one kind of trips people up, but we’re, we’re hoping that that one will change here in, in the coming month.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. All right. What are some other, you know, common questions that, you know, I, I think we hit a lot of the most common ones. And these are literally the, the questions that, that people are asking me about this. But are there any others that you’ve been getting that maybe I haven’t asked today that, that you think some of our listeners might, might have?

Michelle:

I think we touched on it initially, but again, you know, a lot of sellers start their journey on Amazon and just feel like that’s the only place they’re going to stay. But we always say think about growth strategy. So think about where you, your product may end up and it could end up on a store shelf. It could end up on another channel such as walmart.com or some of the others. So, you know, think about your barcoding strategy, your packaging strategy. We did hear I, I did talk to a seller a couple weeks ago about somebody who did not print their barcodes on their products and then all of a sudden they got picked up by Target and now they have to figure out how to redo all their packaging and they have like thousands of packages that they now need to put a barcode on.

Michelle:

So, yeah you know, think ahead, you know, she didn’t expect it, which was a great problem that she had, but you know, now she has to go back and print stickers and put it on her packaging, but change her packaging in the future. So so that’s one thing. And then you know, know, we’re also, like I said, we’re working with industry to move to that 2D barcode. So start investigating if you are using barcodes on your products, how that 2D barcode could be used as well, cuz it could be used for not just the point of sale scan. It now can inc include, include consumer engagement. It could in include traceability, so you could track your product back to source. It’s good for recalls. You put warranty information, there’s a lot you could encode into that 2D barcode. And so we’re hoping to see a shift in, in barcodes that innovation in barcodes over the next couple of years. So always we’ve got a wealth of resources at GS1. If you’re interested in going and innovating in your barcode we could help with that.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Well, let’s talk a little bit more about that. Especially being on the innovation side here, do you think that there might be a, a day where, where there’s gonna be a new standard instead of just you know, the, the, the typical, you know, barcodes that products have had for, you know, a thousand years not a thousand years, but, you know Yeah. For, for, for every hero. Like, like could we move to QR codes as being a, a new standard or, or some other kind of format.

Michelle:

So it’s, remember it’s not necessarily a new standard, so you’re still using that core set of identifiers, that GTIN it’s just embedded into a different type of barcode. So at the base of it, it’s still using the same standard. And you’ll still need to get your GTIN, it’s just encoded into a different type of bar barcode cuz that barcode, the 2D barcode, can carry so much more information than just that linear barcode. I mean, think about it, you could scan a QR code with your phone, whereas you can’t scan a linear barcode with your phone. So that’s where technology is going. And so we thought that the barcode should move with the technology changes and now a consumer can scan that barcode and find so much more information about it than just used for a price lookup at the checkout stand.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Any last words of wisdom or last strategies that you think the listeners need to know about?

Michelle:

No, I mean, I kind of talked about it, you know, just always think about growth, always think about where your product could end up. And you know, plan for, plan for success is what I always like to say. So yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Now one thing I do ask not along the lines of, of e-commerce here, but I’ve been asking almost all my guests here in 2023. This is my year of physical health, mental health, hobbies and stuff. Cuz you know, regardless of we’re selling on Amazon and we’re working at GS1 or whatever, you know, sometimes we, we get a little bit too much caught up in our work and we don’t remember to, to disconnect. So I’m just curious, what’s your, what’s your, what’s a couple of your hobbies? You know, mine is, is food and and travel a lot of it, but what’s some of your hobbies and what, what about your you know, you have any routine for mental and physical health?

Michelle:

I am an avid gardener, so most people who know me know that I love to, I guess, decompress in the garden. So but I’m not a vegetable gardener, so I’m an ornamental gardener. So I like to plant flowers and I like to. Yeah, flowers. Yeah. I can’t grow vegetables like the, the squirrels and the gophers and the birds eat everything. So I gave up on that kind of gardening. So I’m an avid ornamental gardener, so that’s where I decompress and have fun.

Bradley Sutton:

Unique ones in your garden?

Michelle:

I’m starting to get into herbs because you could also use them for cooking, so kind of on the edge of vegetables, but they’re also really they’re just different. So yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well, if the zombie apocalypse happens might not be able to have a lot of food there, but you’re, you’ll have a nicely decorated place, I guess. Okay.

Michelle:

Be very loving.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, cool. Cool. All right, well, there you go. I like it, you know, no, no, two people have the same, the same hobbies, but, but the important thing, guys, if you’re listening, you know, every single guest does have something that they’re doing. You know, it’s important, you know, cuz there, there was a time where I probably couldn’t say that I did. And, and, you know, you work yourself, you could literally work yourself to death if you don’t have your own escapes True. So it’s important that everybody picks their own their own thing. All right. Well you know, Michelle, thank you so much for, for joining us again. And if people want to, you know, maybe they’re like, Hey, I didn’t get my question in, or I’m still curious about this. People wanna, you know, reach out to GS1 to ask some questions. How can they they find you guys on the interwebs out there?

Michelle:

Sure. So we’ve got first of all, our website is gs1us.org which has a lot of information out there. We also have a very robust YouTube channel, the GS1 US YouTube channel, which has a lot of great videos. We also do a couple of spotlights on small businesses and how they got started out with GS1 and some of the challenges they may have been facing. So those are some great business some great resources. We also do a bo a podcast if you’re interested in just all things supply chain. We’ve got a, the supply chain podcast, which I’m sure we could provide all the links for you. So those are some great resources.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Awesome. Awesome. Will I be seeing you at any upcoming Amazon events like Amazon Accelerate or anything like that?

Michelle:

I don’t dunno yet. I haven’t really I usually go to the Prosper Show. I think we saw each other at the Prosper show, but I don’t have anything planned at the right now for the rest of the year.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. All right. Well, I look forward to seeing you when I see you. And then if not, you know, next year we’ll definitely try and bring you back on the podcast and see what kind of cool things you’ve innovated there at GS1.

Michelle:

All right. Sounds good. Thank you.

---

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast. 

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast 

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: 

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business. 
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.