All that changed when we decided to sell some dice bags directly on Amazon. In addition to product photography and other details like the exact dimensions and shipping weights etc that we had to put together we also realized that we needed bar codes or UPC codes for our products.
Our first instinct was to ask the Twitterverse for answers, and we did. Almost immediately he got an answer from our good friend Phil of 5th Street Games.
But being designers, we decided to delve deeper into the seedy underbelly of UPC selling and buying. What we discovered was a monopolistic standards organization that charges an arm, a leg, and an arm, and a leg for a pool of UPCs so big that a small company will never use it all. And a small set of approved resellers that charge anywhere from almost nothing to a small portion of your arm.
Even though all these resellers are "official" some of them don't inspire a lot of confidence (or any) and we could not buy from them even if they were charging pennies. The cost in time, money, and hassle of changing all current inventory and listings to a new UPC code if a reseller disappears was not worth the savings of a few dollars.
Eventually we did find a reseller that was good and we are now happy customers.
Eventually we did find a reseller that was good and we are now happy customers.
So you don't have to go through all the work we had to do, we have put together a handy reference doc with information about our top two picks.
