How to Get a Barcode for Your Product
Two completely different things get called “getting a barcode”, and almost every confused search for one is really about the other.
The first is the symbol — the pattern of black bars. That is arithmetic. A set of digits goes in, bar widths come out, the rules are published, and there is nothing to license, buy or sign up for. Our barcode generator draws one in your browser in a fraction of a second, at print resolution, with no watermark.
The second is the number inside it. On a retail product that number is a GTIN, and the digits at the front of it identify a company that licensed them from GS1. That part is not free, and no generator anywhere can give it to you — including ours.
The short version: if your barcode never crosses a shop till, you need nothing but a generator. If it does, you need a number issued to your business, and the generator is the last five seconds of the job.
When you do not need to buy anything at all
This covers far more cases than people expect. If the barcode exists so that your own system can scan it, the number is yours to invent:
- Asset tags — laptops, tools, test equipment, musical instruments
- Stock bins, shelf locations and warehouse positions
- Library or archive copy numbers
- Internal work orders, job sheets and batch numbers
- Event tickets, membership cards and visitor badges
- Samples, lab specimens and equipment loan records
- Products you sell only through your own shop or market stall, scanned by your own till
For all of these, use Code 128 rather than a retail format. It takes letters as well as digits, so BIN-0042 or LAPTOP-114 encodes directly — which is both more useful to read and impossible to mistake for a product GTIN. If you have a whole list to do at once, the bulk generator takes a pasted column or numbers a run for you.
When you genuinely do need a licensed number
The moment someone else’s scanner is meant to recognise your product, the number has to be globally unique — and the only way to guarantee that is for it to have been issued to you. In practice that means:
- Selling through a supermarket, chain or independent retailer
- Listing on Amazon, and most other large marketplaces
- Supplying a distributor or wholesaler
- Anything that will be ordered, invoiced or stocktaked by trading partners using the code
Here the number comes from GS1, the organisation that administers GTINs worldwide through national member offices. You license a company prefix and then assign your own item numbers within it, which is why a business with one product and a business with four hundred pay differently. Fees, tiers and renewal terms vary by country, so the only reliable figure is the one on your own national GS1 office’s site.
Why cheap barcodes off eBay get rejected
Search for a barcode number and you will find resellers offering single UPCs for a few pounds. These are almost always fragments of prefixes issued to other companies before GS1 tightened its rules — the number is real, it scans, and it is registered to somebody who is not you.
For years that did not matter much. It matters now: Amazon validates GTINs against the GS1 registry when a listing is created, and a mismatch between the brand on the listing and the company on the registry gets the listing rejected — or suppressed months later, after you have built up reviews on it. Supermarket buyers run the same check. A number that fails this test has not saved you anything.
If your product genuinely does not need a GTIN — handmade goods, your own private label, bundles — Amazon’s GTIN exemption is the legitimate route, and it is free. Apply for it rather than buying a number that will not hold up.
Books are a special case
A book’s barcode is its ISBN, printed as an EAN-13 beginning 978 or 979. You do not go to GS1 for it — you go to the ISBN agency for your country, which in the United States is Bowker and elsewhere is usually a national library or publishing body. Once you have the ISBN, the barcode is an ordinary EAN-13, often printed with a small five-digit price add-on beside it.
Which symbol goes with which job
- EAN-13 — retail products outside North America. Thirteen digits.
- UPC-A — retail products in the US and Canada. Twelve digits, and really an EAN-13 with a leading zero.
- EAN-8 — packaging too small for EAN-13. Issued number by number, not as a prefix.
- ITF-14 — the outer shipping carton, not the item inside it.
- Code 128 — everything internal. Letters, digits, punctuation, any length.
- Code 39 — older inventory, ID and defence systems that will not take anything else.
Getting it onto the packaging without it failing at the till
A technically perfect barcode still fails if it is printed badly, and the failures are boringly consistent. Four things to get right:
- Size. EAN-13 has a nominal size of about 37 × 26 mm, and GS1 allows retail packaging to use between 80% and 200% of it. Below 80% the fixed scanners at supermarket tills start missing reads — and a barcode that fails at the till is the thing a buyer will reject artwork over.
- The quiet zone. The blank margin at each end is part of the symbol. It tells the scanner where the code starts. Do not let a designer crop to the first bar.
- Resolution. Send vector artwork. Download the SVG rather than a PNG so the symbol is re-rendered sharp at whatever size the printer places it, instead of a bitmap being scaled up.
- Contrast. Black bars, white background. Coloured bars and tinted backgrounds are a recurring cause of unscannable packaging, and red bars are effectively invisible to older red-laser scanners.
Before a print run of anything, print one at final size on the material it will actually be printed on, and scan it with the kind of scanner it will actually meet. Five minutes here has saved a great many reprints.
What about the check digit?
The last digit of an EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A or ITF-14 is not part of your product number — it is calculated from the digits before it, so a scanner can catch its own misreads instead of reporting the wrong product. You do not have to work it out: type the number one digit short and our check digit calculator completes it, or paste the whole thing and it tells you whether it adds up. If it does not, the digit named is usually the fix — but check the rest of the number against its source first, because correcting a check digit to match a mistyped product number just gives you a valid barcode for the wrong product.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use a free barcode generator for a product I am selling?
Yes, for the symbol — that is all a generator makes, and ours is free with no watermark or sign-up. The number in it has to be a GTIN issued to your business if the product is going through retailers or marketplaces. The generator is not the part you pay for.
Do I need a barcode to sell on Amazon?
Usually a GTIN, yes, and Amazon checks it against the GS1 registry. The alternative is a GTIN exemption, which is free to apply for and intended for exactly the cases where a product has no reason to carry one.
Is it illegal to make up my own barcode number?
Not illegal, but on a product for sale it is a practical problem rather than a legal one: the number may already identify somebody else’s product, and the systems that scan it will treat it as theirs. For internal labelling there is no issue at all.
How long does it take to get a GS1 number?
Registration with a national GS1 office is typically same-day to a few days, and you can assign item numbers within your prefix immediately afterwards. The slow part is normally your own packaging artwork, not the licensing.
Can I reuse a barcode number for a different product?
No. A GTIN identifies one specific product in one specific configuration — change the size, the flavour or the pack count and it needs its own number. Reusing one puts the wrong item in every partner’s system that already has the old one.
Do I need a different barcode for the shipping box?
Yes — that is what ITF-14 is for, and its first digit records how many retail units are inside. A case of twelve and a case of twenty-four of the same product are two different numbers.