Episode Details

I'd never heard of the hazmat flag before, but apparently it isn't all that uncommon happening on such random products as baseballs, toy cars, and... my product.

It's been a longer process getting it cleared than it should be, and as such I'm being forced to switch gears. Let's dive in to find out what happened!

To leave a comment head to http://brandingblitz.com/6/

Full Transcript below:

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Hello again, and welcome back to the Branding Blitz podcast! I'm JR, and this is episode 6.

It's been well a couple weeks since I recorded the last episode because I've had a long string of bad days with my health and life's been kind of crazy as a result. I went to the doctor yesterday, and got another steroid shot and some new meds, so I'm doing a bit better now, but still a bit out of whack.There have been some interesting things happening in the meantime though.

After I recorded episode 5, discussing some common questions I'd seen about barcodes, it occurred to me that this is the kind of thing that would be handy to have in text form as well. Podcasts are a great format for explaining things, but they're not easily searchable if you are looking for a specific piece of information. So I put together a guide that is divided up into different sections with a table of contents that lets you jump to a specific question.The response to that guide has been fantastic. In the time since I posted that guide, it has nearly doubled in size as people have asked more questions and I've been able to add those answers to the guide. Each time I think I've got all the main stuff answered, someone else comes along and asks a great question, so it just keeps growing. My hope is that I can turn it into the most comprehensive guide to FBA barcodes possible. And that is made possible by people like you continuing to give feedback and asking more questions. If you'd like to check it out, you can find a link by going to http://brandingblitz.com/resources/The feedback I've gotten on this guide has truly been AMAZING – I love to teach people and knowing how helpful this has been is really exciting to me. It's inspired me not just to try and make this guide as comprehensive as possible, but also to try to create more guides. So I'd love to hear from you what topics you'd like to see a thorough guide created about.

The past couple of weeks have been eventful for my product sourcing adventure as well – in some ways a little more eventful than I wanted this part of the process to be.I was ready to submit an order for my first product, but had decided I wanted to put the FNSKU on the product packaging straight from the manufacturer. So I set up the listing in Amazon to get the FNSKU. I went in to create a shipment so I could retrieve the label, and got an error message stating that the product was flagged as a potential hazmat issue and was under review.I had never heard of this before, but apparently, it isn't all that uncommon. Hazmat by the way is short for Hazardous Materials. Anything that is flammable, explosive, poisonous, corrosive, aerosol, or contains a lithium ion battery is supposed to automatically get flagged – so if your product matches any of those things be aware that you may have an issue.But my product didn't match any of those things, and I wasn't sure why it got flagged. In searching the internet and talking to people about my issue, I came across people who had really random products flagged. One person had a baseball flagged as hazmat, another person had a tennis ball – not sure what's going on with the sporting goods but those were two different people! Someone said they'd had a toy car that ha