How Do Barcodes Work – and How to Make a Barcode

Almost everywhere you go shopping, you find products with UPC barcodes. This type of product identification (Universal Product Code) has become commonplace for the last 35 years or so. Perhaps you’ve been curious to know how those lines and numbers in the UPC barcodes work.

If you’re a manufacturer or a re-seller, large or small, using UPC barcodes can help streamline the whole merchandising chain..saving you time and money, and likely increasing your profits. I’ll tell you how to make a bar code for each of your products a little later.

While bar codes can be used to keep track of any number of things, I’ll give you a typical example:

Ok, let’s say you run a small retail store. It’s a modest size, and you have hundreds of items for sale, both large and small. You obviously need to keep track of what you have in stock, and when to order more of any given item. You can’t waste your time checking each shelf and writing down what seems to be in short supply. This is where barcode software and barcode readers or scanners come into play.

The barcode software is basically a database program, designed to keep track of your stock, by scanning the UPC barcodes of supplies as they arrive..with a barcode reader, or scanner. Then, at the store checkout, or point-of-sale, another scanner (either a hand-held pen or wand, or a larger countertop CCD or laser scanner, or more recently, a miniature digital camera device) verifies the barcode of the purchased item, and compares the UPC number with that item in the database, then calls up the current price of that item from the database.

The barcode software also enables you to tell the customer whether you have a particular item in stock via any computer screen in the store that’s wired to the database. The information in the database can also be used to compile and compare various statistics about buying patterns and any number of other interesting facts. Some of these factors can be shared with suppliers to keep the most popular items in stock, while perhaps dropping items that just seem to stick around, unpurchased.

Although a number of concepts for product identification go back to the early 1930’s, including a ‘bulls-eye’ pattern of concentric circles of varying line thickness, and another of semi-circular lines, the bar code system we know today was developed in the early 1970’s, by George Laurer, who was working for IBM at the time. The UPC barcode, or UPC-A, consists of a series of parallel lines and white spaces of specific thickness and spacing. It uses a 12 number code.

Here’s a video that explains what the various lines and numbers mean…

The numbers below the barcode are not read by the scanner, they are the human-readable version of the code number, in case the barcode is damaged or unreadable by the scanner, in which case the 12-digit number is entered manually by the operator.

There’s also a short version of the code, known as UPC-E. This is used on smaller packages where the standard barcode size would be too large.

Each product and package needs its own special barcode. It’s up to the manufacturer to make sure that no two barcodes are alike. This is quite easy to do with the barcode software.

EAN product codes

Outside the U.S. and Canada, the product barcode is a slightly different system known as EAN (European Article Number), which uses a 13 number system. The extra digit allows for the inclusion of the country of the company that packaged the product (not necessarily the country the product was manufactured in).

The EAN code (known as EAN-13) also has a shortened version..EAN-8.

Most recently made scanners will be able to read both UPC and EAN (both long and short forms). However, if you have older UPC scanners, they may not be able to read the EAN barcodes.

If you intend to sell your products through major retailers, you must have a UPC barcode on your products. Depending on the size of your business you may have to register with GS1, the international organization that co-ordinates the assigning of barcodes. Here’s a list of local GS1 websites for each country:

Find your local GS1 website

The initial registration cost is based on your companies’ projected yearly earnings, but it generally costs a few hundred dollars, plus a much smaller annual fee. There’s lots of helpful information on these sites, to answer any questions you may have about implementing a barcode system.

About other barcode sellers…

If your business is fairly small you could decide to buy your barcodes from a third-party for a smaller fee. However, you must be careful about these online companies. Usually, the first part of the barcode is their company. So the retailer may have trouble identifying your products. Also, if the online barcode seller goes out of business, you’d have a hell of a time tracking where your products are, and getting your money back from them. Buyer beware.

The use of barcodes in merchandising and many other goods and services has reduced the cost of keeping track of all kinds of things. Whether it’s a localised warehouse system to help keep things sorted, or a major distribution chain, or a courier service. It all comes down to reducing the cost of keeping tabs on what you’ve got, and where it’s going.

This article ©2011 by +timorous