Any one else bought EAN barcodes off eBay? my cousin got some and now Amazon are Blocking them unless they are from GS1

The more people realise this the better. You can’t just have someone pick an EAN and start using it.

eBay sellers simply can not sell you EANs that will be accepted by others - they have no authority to license you these barcodes in a way that other parties will recognise. Can you imagine the chaos if any old eBay user could assign EANs to anyone? Two users get given the same EAN by two different sellers, who is right?

At best they’re selling you a unique block of codes, sublet if you will, from their own registration. No trading partner will recognise these as YOUR EANs because that’s not what the databases will reflect. At worst they’re just taking your money and falsely telling people they can use EANs wich are likely licensed to other people or sold multiple times to different buyers.

There’s a reason we use GS1. Trade would seriously suck without a recognised authority here. The license fees are perfectly reasonable, about £10 per month for small sellers.

We’ve requested hundreds of listings be taken down because sellers are using EANs licensed to our company. A quick search of the recognised trade databases confirms this and listings are quickly removed. No doubt repeat offenders get extra attention from amazon for the inconvenience they cause to amazon, other sellers and indeed buyers.