GLN (Global Location Number)

Amazon & D2C glossary · Harpy Media

A GLN (Global Location Number) is GS1’s unique 13-digit identifier for a physical location or legal entity — a factory, a warehouse, a company office, a billing address. Where GTINs name products, GLNs name places and parties in the supply chain.

What is GLN?

A GLN (Global Location Number) is GS1’s unique 13-digit identifier for a physical location or legal entity — a factory, a warehouse, a company office, a billing address. Where GTINs name products, GLNs name places and parties in the supply chain.

The GLN is the digital address book entry of modern trade: EDI messages, invoices, and shipping documents reference locations by GLN so machines can route and reconcile without a human decoding “that warehouse in the north, the one by the airport.” Big retail runs on this; Amazon’s vendor systems increasingly do too.

Where GLNs do their quiet work

Three interfaces. Document routing: EDI invoices, purchase orders, and shipment notices carry GLN identifiers for ship-from, ship-to, and bill-to parties — a wrong or missing GLN is a document that fails automated matching, which is how invoices end up in dispute queues. Logistics precision: a shipment destined for a specific facility needs the facility identified unambiguously; GLNs remove the “which address?” ambiguity that causes misroutes and receiving exceptions. And master-data alignment: in GDSN-connected retail, both the product (GTIN) and the parties (GLNs) are standardised — pair them and the whole transaction chain can be automated; miss one and humans get invited back in.

Getting and using one properly

The route: GLNs come from GS1 (via your national member organisation), allocated per location and per legal entity as needed — and registered so trading partners can look them up. The disciplines: one GLN per real location (don’t reuse an old warehouse’s number for a new building; the audit trail degrades), keep them consistent across your systems (ERP, EDI mappings, customs paperwork all referencing the same identifiers), and share them with partners proactively during onboarding — vendors who join retail accounts with their GLNs ready clear documentation setup in days instead of rounds of email. For brands working with Amazon vendor or retail EDI flows, this is unglamorous infrastructure that prevents a category of automated-processing failures.

In practice

A vendor’s invoices start landing in dispute queues after a warehouse move — the new facility shipped freight under the old location’s documentation. The root cause: the GLN list was never updated for the new entity, so automated matching paired invoices to the retired location. The fix — new GLN registered, mappings updated in the ERP and EDI flows, partners notified — resolves the queue, and the discipline going forward (locations and identifiers change together, always) prevents the recurrence.

How Harpy Media helps

Master-data setup — GTINs, GLNs, and the document flows that reference them — is part of how we onboard clients into vendor and enterprise retail operations cleanly.

GLN FAQ

What is a GLN?

Global Location Number — GS1’s unique 13-digit identifier for a physical location or legal entity in trade — warehouses, factories, companies.

How is a GLN different from a GTIN?

GTIN identifies a product; GLN identifies a place or party. Documents reference both: what shipped (GTIN) from/to where (GLNs).

Do Amazon sellers need GLNs?

Mostly relevant for vendor and retail-EDI operations where automated document routing matters; marketplace-only sellers rarely need them directly.