GSIN (Goods and Services Identification Number)

The Goods and Services Identification Number (GSIN) is the code system the federal government used to classify the goods and services it buys; the codes ride on solicitations, standing offers, and contract records across the historical record.

Codes are how the record is searched and aggregated: buyers classify opportunities by them, suppliers filter feeds by them, and award data rolls up under them. Federal procurement has been migrating to UNSPSC, the international product classification, so both code systems appear across Canadian datasets — knowing which system a dataset uses is part of reading it correctly. Suppliers researching a buyer's history search by code first, because a code pulls awards a keyword search misses, including work titled in ways your product name never appears.

@misc{pi-2026-definitions-gsin,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {GSIN (Goods and Services Identification Number) — definition},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/definitions/gsin},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}