Barcodes Explained

How Retail Barcodes Work

A barcode is a symbol that visually encodes numbers with differently sized black bars. Scanners then read and retrieve the numbers. Retail environments primarily use barcodes, where each barcode is assigned to a different product, though other applications exist as well.

This system has many benefits which is why barcodes are ubiquitous in retail stores around the world. These benefits include:

  • Quickly pulling up accurate pricing information at the checkout
  • Reducing human error by using an electronic scanner
  • Keeping track of stock changes in real time
  • Easy reordering when stock gets low

Grocery store

For these reasons and more, retail stores will likely insist that your product has a barcode if you want to sell it there. This system functions because barcode numbers remain unique. If anyone could create their own barcode, the numbers wouldn’t be unique identifiers anymore, as different products could share the same barcode, causing confusion. The barcode inventors understood this, so in the 1970s, they established the Uniform Code Council (UCC) in the USA to regulate codes and ensure their uniqueness. A few years later, the European Article Numbering Association (EAN) was founded to manage barcode use outside the US. To this day, North America uses 12-digit UPC barcodes, while the rest of the world uses 13-digit EAN codes.

It is important to note that your barcode does not contain any details about your product, it is simply a unique number and image representing that number. Product information is input by the retailer when they add your item into their computer system. This is why if you take a football from a sporting goods store and scan it at the checkout of a makeup shop, nothing will come up (unless the makeup shop also sells that particular football).

How are Barcodes Unique?

Barcodes are regulated and distributed by the global organisation known as GS1. GS1 was formed when the UCC combined with the EAN. This is a membership organisation which licenses out barcodes. This means to get barcodes directly from GS1 you would have to file the paperwork to join (along with a joining fee, location dependent), Next you wait to be accepted, and then pay expensive yearly license fees to maintain use of your barcodes. Retail stores require a GS1 barcode on products they stock. However, luckily GS1 is not the only provider of such codes. Instead, you can buy your codes from a genuine barcode reseller such as us, paying a smaller one-time fee and owning the codes for life.

GS1

Where do Our Barcodes Come From?

GS1 was formed when the UCC and EAN merged in the late 1990s. Before this merger, the UCC sold barcodes for a one off cost, while EAN licensed them out like GS1 does today. After the merger, the newly formed GS1-US decided to charge annual license fees. They included members who had originally purchased barcodes for a one-off cost. Unsurprisingly, the members became unhappy about yearly fees for codes they had bought and owned. They filed a class action lawsuit, which resulted in a victory for the barcode owners. As a consequence, GS1 had to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement. More importantly, the lawsuit established that businesses that purchased barcodes from the UCC before it adopted the license business model owned the barcodes, and GS1 no longer controlled them, even though they were legitimate GS1 codes. All codes sold by barcode resellers, including us, originate from these privately owned barcodes.

 

Ready to purchase barcodes now that you understand their origin? Click Here to visit our EAN-13 barcode product page.