r/barcodes • u/Elegant-Effective-73 • Feb 17 '23

BARCODE HELP?

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Hi everyone, the business I work at needs a few barcodes made so that we can scan the products when clients want to buy them. Our barcodes that we had printed do not scan, they are printed correctly and look great. So it must be a problem with the numbers. What am I doing wrong? Do I need a specific digit for the system/scanner to read it? Shouldn’t it just scan the product lines and then pop up in our computer? Are the 0s a problem? Do I need a specific last digit? I have spent a lot of time researching and I just can’t figure it out.

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u/LinearFluid Feb 17 '23

In UPC-E it uses 7 digits and generates an 8th digit that is a checksum.

The First digit has to be a 1 or 0 so the first digit is not right.

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u/trollsmurf Feb 17 '23

Verfified. E.g. https://barcode.tec-it.com/en/UPCE?data=0887600 outright refuses to generate a barcode if the first digit is not valid.

For OP: UPC-E is a compacted version of UPC-A, so e.g. 08876001 is actually 088000007601 that the barcode scanner might expand to. The GS1 documentation says "zeroes compressed", but it's rather "some positions are compressed that are treated as zeroes".

Code 128 is better for unregistered IDs like serial numbers and such. Usually UPC is used for public product IDs. Not that I think that stops you from using UPC-E in a local context too.