eBay allows the use of some default values when the EAN or MPN are unknown. In the case of Spain, the value that you should use is “No aplicable”.

EAN standards are managed by GS1 (formerly known as International EAN) and UCC (Uniform Code Council). If you don’t have yet the EAN of your products, you can generate them on http://www.gs1es.org/ (we recommend you search some information about the associated costs).

There are websites and API’s external to eBay (http://www.programmableweb.com/api/open-eangtin-database, http://eandata.com, http://www.decept.co.uk/ean-lookup) where you can search EAN codes from titles or descriptions of products. However, they only contain subsets of the total of existing products, so the best alternative is asking for the information to the manufacturer.

The EAN is an international number, as an adopted standard all over the world except EE.UU and Canada. The EAN codes are similar to UPC, but the EAN codes have 13 digits. The products on sell out of EE.UU have an standard barcode (EAN), however, the products on sale in EE.UU and Canada need an UPC barcode.

• They allow the buyers to find faster the products, both on eBay as on Google Shopping.
• They increase the visibility of the ads in the results of the searches on Google Shopping.
• They improve the SEO positioning, getting the attraction of more buyers to the ads.

The identifier are codes that you can usually find in the label of the product or as an encrypted image in the barcodes of the articles.

• BRAND
• REFERENCE NUMBER OF THE MANUFACTURER (MPN)
• GLOBAL NUMBER OF COMMERCIAL ARTICLE (GTIN)
• EAN-13
• UPC-A
• ISBN