Buy on Amazon ~ B004D2BHH6Article of interest
Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs) are unique blocks of 10 letters and/or numbers that identify items. You can find the ASIN on the item's product information page on Amazon.ca and in the URL for the page.
The quickest way to find your product's ASIN is to look in your browser's address bar. Copy the number that appears after the item name and "dp" in the address:
ASINs are unique identifiers that are assigned by Amazon to products used in the Amazon realm of companies. Often times the same product could have different ASINs when accessed from Amazon web sites for different countries even though the product has the same EAN number on both sites.
Books that have a 10 digit ISBN number will use that as their ASIN for the most part. But products that are not books or even books that only have 13 digit EAN numbers need to have a shorter 10 digit ASIN number assigned to them. This pattern most likely comes from the fact that Amazon started out as an online book store and then expanded so keeping the 10 digit identification code makes a lot of sense.
Because the ASIN can be both digits and letters, it is very easy to store many more product identifiers with 10 characters than the 13 digit only EAN number could while saving a lot of space in their database system over millions of products.
If you know the ASIN of a product, you can quickly look that product up on any of the Amazon sites by placing the ASIN into the URL. The pattern is the domain name, slash, dp, slash, ASIN. A trailing slash is optional.
http://amazon.com/dp/[ASIN-GOES-HERE]
http://amazon.com/dp/B003MULES2/
http://amazon.com/dp/B0010O748Q
When possible, we at EANdata.com try to connect our dat to both the EAN and the ASIN because so many products are available on Amazon for sale and offer more information and our goal is always to get the end user as much informationa bout a product as we possibly can. So naturally, if we can link to this information we would. We will even allow searching of our data using the ASIN number in addition to searching by UPC, EAN or ISBN.
To learn more about the ASIN numbers and how they work, please visit Amazon or WikipediA.