Did you know this about the Barcodes?
3 min readBefore you buy a barcode, you must be aware with the facts regarding the Barcodes, their types and their structure. We have tried to explain the structure of a barcode and why it is important.
The barcode is the goods’ social security number. Just as the social security number indicates a person’s birthday, the bar code provides information about the origin of the item in the form of a numeric code. This code identifies the item, no matter where in the world it is shipped. There are more than 200 different bar code systems, but the most common is what we know from the goods on the grocery store shelves, the so-called EAN code. The name stands for European Article Number.
The European code has a sister model in the United States, called UPC, the Universal Product Code. Apart from the name, however, the two codes are exactly the same. The barcode system uses the binary number system, which is the language of all computers. In this system, also called the total system, all numbers are written as a combination of zeros and ones. The dark lines are ones, while the white spaces are zeros. If a dark line is wide, it means that there are several ones in a row, and in the same way the width of the white spaces indicates the number of zeros.
There are four different widths of lines and spaces, and with that it becomes possible to write all numbers between zero and nine. When the clerk pulls the item past the scanner, the barcode is read by a laser light beam in less than a second. However, the item’s 13 digits are also written with ordinary digits below the EAN barcode India, so that the clerk can, if necessary, also enter it manually. Based on the number, the computer looks up the item in the company’s database and provides it with the price and the item name that applies in the relevant store.
The first two digits of the barcode are a country code, which tells you which country the manufacturer comes from. This is followed by five digits, which indicate who the manufacturer is, while the following five digits are the serial number of the individual product. The last digit in the barcode is a so-called check digit, which ensures that the other digits have been scanned or printed correctly. Using the check digit, the computer makes a calculation, which gives the wrong result, if a single digit in the item number is incorrect. The first patent for a bar code system was obtained in 1952.
It is important that you pay for the right barcodes for your business. Such as, you can’t use Ecommerce UPC barcodes as a retail barcode for product packaging. The barcode providers don’t confirm the retail validity and the uniqueness of the barcodes. That’s why, if you use Create UPC barcode as retail barcodes then you may find more than one products with the same barcode in a store.
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