eBay’s Vice President of UK Trading Murray Lambell has joined the GS1 UK supervisory board. The appointment strengthens GS1 UK’s marketplace team, which builds a community for members selling via online platforms to connect with others and works with industry leaders such as eBay, Amazon and Alibaba to increase adoption of its standards.
Murray will be able to put eBay’s sellers’ position across to GS1 and highlight the challenges that these sellers face. For instance, whil no one can argue that if a product has a GTIN it makes sense to add this GTIN to their eBay listing, looking up that GTIN still isn’t easy. It’s easy to search a GTIN to verify which product it relates to, it’s not easy to search a product to identify the correct GTIN associated with that SKU.
eBay sellers also generally have need of much lower quantities of GTINs for their marketplace products and whilst GS1 have worked in recent years to make GTINs more easily available, for micro sellers it still represents an investment which some view as optional rather than mandatory.
At the same time as Murray’s appointment, Wendy Manning, Head of Retail Supply & Innovation at Boots as also been appointed to the GS1 UK supervisory board
eBay and Boots join the likes of Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, Tesco, Amazon and Unilever on GS1 UK’s supervisory board, which is chaired by Chris Tyas who spent more than three decades with Nestle.
The new GS1 UK supervisory board members were announced at GS1 UK’s AGM in Marylebone last week, where Marcus Dunsmore of Mondelez and Terry Murphy, formerly of John Lewis, received Life Member Awards as they stepped down from the board.
The AGM rounds off a busy period for GS1 UK after it recently announced that Sainsbury’s had signed up to productDNA and that it been made a strategic partner by the Department for International Trade.
“Our supervisory board helps establish the strategic direction of GS1 UK and, together with our 39,000 members, gives us the industry perspective with regard to the latest trends and sentiment across a variety of sectors.
Adding individuals of Murray and Wendy’s calibre to the group will strengthen our industry expertise and ensure we continue to evolve by driving the customer experience agenda powered by quality of data.”
– Chris Tyas, chairman, GS1 UK
