10 Sep What is an Amazon ASIN and what do you need it for?

There are numerous terms and acronyms on Amazon that can be confusing for new sellers. One of these terms is the ASIN. In this article, we’re going to break down what this acronym stands for, why it’s important, and how it can affect your Amazon experience.

What is Amazon ASIN?

The ASIN, which stands for “Amazon Standard Identification Number,” is a 10-character code that Amazon uses to identify products within its platform. Each product on Amazon receives a unique ASIN, which makes it easy to find and organize in Amazon’s inventory. This number is especially useful for identifying the exact same product among different sellers or on different Amazon marketplaces globally.

The ASIN code only varies in the case of books, because those types of articles always come with a number called a 10-character ISBN, and only in those cases will the ASIN be exactly the same as the ISBN. The ASIN is the first thing you need to get your products distributed on Amazon.

It will allow you to do a lot of things, from managing the content you want to display for each product, product inventory, performance metrics of a product.

For example, to run Amazon ADS campaigns you will need to know the ASIN code to measure your ACOS or any other metric in campaigns you will always measure them by ASIN. If you are going to do Amazon SEO with any tool such as Helium10 or jungle Scout, you will also need to know the ASIN to be able to analyze the product in SEO, see what keywords it is positioning with and what range of improvement it has.

Origin and Purposes of Amazon ASINs

Amazon developed the ASIN in the 1990s, in the early days of the company. At the time, Amazon started as an online bookstore and quickly expanded its catalog to include a variety of products as it needed an efficient and standardized way to catalog and track these products.

At the time, the ASIN was inspired by existing product identification systems such as the ISBN (International Standard Book Number), used for books. However, unlike the ISBN, which is limited to books, the ASIN is more versatile and applies to all Amazon products.

The main purpose of the ASIN is to provide a unique identifier for each product. This makes it easy to find, track, and manage products on your platform. With millions of products, Amazon needed an efficient way to organize and access product information. ASINs allow users and Amazon’s system to quickly find specific products.
ASINs are crucial to Amazon’s inventory management, enabling accurate stock tracking, product location in warehouses, and order and shipping management. In addition, ASINs help Amazon maintain detailed control over each product’s information, including descriptions, pricing, availability, and reviews.

How to find an ASIN on Amazon?

A product’s ASIN appears on virtually every published product page on Amazon. You can find it in the “Product Information” section, in the Additional Product Information section. This is also the section where the average of customer ratings, the positioning of the product among the best sellers and other details that may be of interest appear.

A product’s Amazon ASIN also appears in a product’s page URL even if it doesn’t appear in the Product Information portion. Another way to find a product using the ASIN is through the URL, where you can type in the amazon address and include the ASIN code you want to find and it will automatically direct you to the listing of the product you want. A simple example is this:

Simply what you have to do is type the Amazon url where you want to find the product and after the “.es/dp/” you simply type or paste the ASIN of the product, that is the URL that will redirect us directly to the product publication.

ASINs for Products with Variants on Amazon

We know that each product is assigned a unique code, so no ASIN is the same. But also, it’s important for you to know that there is a different ASIN for each variant of the product, for example, if we have a product with size or color variants in the case of clothing, or variants in storage capacity on mobile, each of those variants will have an ASIN. If, for example, we have a men’s t-shirt and this t-shirt has different sizes being all of the same model, the variant in this case would be the size, which means that each size will be assigned a different ASIN code.

The ASIN is a code that you don’t have when you go to create your products in the catalog, which is logical because this is a code that Amazon assigns directly, you don’t generate it yourself. So once you have uploaded your product listing, these ASIN codes will be requested and after a few days, Amazon will respond with the ASINs that correspond to each of your products.

It is important that you always have the ASIN of your products for any changes or updates you want to make to your stock available on Amazon, because directly with the ASIN you will be able to update information from a file if in the case of several products, or directly from your catalog you could track the item you want to modify using only the ASIN to access the details.