Retail Barcodes
Product barcodes used at checkout and on packaging. Choose a format below to generate one for free — no sign-up required.
About retail barcodes
Retail barcodes all encode the same thing underneath: a GTIN, the number that identifies a *product*, not an individual item. Every jar of the same sauce in the same size carries the same barcode; the till looks the number up in the shop's own catalogue to find the price. That is why a price is never stored in the barcode itself, and why changing a price never means reprinting labels.
Which format you use is mostly geography and space. EAN-13 is the global default. UPC-A is the twelve-digit North American form of the same number, and most scanners read both. EAN-8 and UPC-E exist for packaging too small to carry the full symbol — they are not shorter numbers so much as compressed printings of one, with zeroes suppressed and restored at the scanner.
The last digit is a check digit, calculated from the ones before it, which is what lets a scanner reject a misread instead of ringing up the wrong product. Our generator calculates it for you; if you have been given a thirteen-digit number that ends in a digit you were told to include, that digit is the check digit and should not be entered twice.
Retail Barcodes — frequently asked questions
Not for anything you intend to sell through a retailer. The number has to come from a GS1 company prefix issued to your business, because the prefix is what makes it unique worldwide — an invented number will very likely already belong to somebody else's product. Generating the image is free and instant here; obtaining the number is a separate step you take with GS1. For internal use — your own stockroom, your own scanners — any number you control is fine.