Looking up DUNS numbers for Apple’s VPP program

As part of an ongoing project, I needed to set up a new Apple VPP account for use with a test environment. The reason I did this was that I didn’t want to cause conflicts with our production VPP account. When I went to set up the account though, I ran into an interesting problem.

As part of the VPP account setup, I needed to provide a DUNS number. However, the DUNS number I had belongs to a company based outside of the US and Apple’s US VPP enrollment site would only accept DUNS numbers associated with US addresses. Instead, I needed to use the DUNS number for my company’s US subsidiary in place of the DUNS number that I had. The problem was that I had no idea what that DUNS number was.

After some research, I found a way to look up the DUNS number I needed and was able to successfully register my test environment’s VPP account with Apple. For more details, see below the jump.

Dun & Bradstreet, the company which runs the the DUNS system, provides a way to look up DUNS numbers on their website. To use this lookup, use the procedure shown below:

1. Go to http://www.dnb.com/duns-number/lookup.html

2. Go to Search By Company Name

3. Enter your company information, check the I’m not a robot checkbox, then click the Search Now button.

For example, here’s how to use this to find Walmart‘s DUNS number. I looked up the address of Walmart’s corporate headquarters in Benton, Arkansas and did a search using that.

The site gave me several options to choose from and I picked the most likely one, based on the address and phone number information I had for Walmart.

I was requested to enter an email address, to have the DUNS information emailed to me.

Shortly afterwards, I received an email with the appropriate DUNS number.