EAN

If you sell something made in Europe, this is the barcode on it.

Reading the thirteen digits

They are not random. The number splits into three parts:

• The first digits are the GS1 company prefix, which says who registered the product
• The middle digits are that company’s own item number
• The last digit is a check digit, worked out from the twelve before it

The first two or three digits often hint at a country, but they say where the number was registered, not where the goods were made. A 50 prefix is a UK registration. It does not mean the jacket was sewn in Leicester.

In Shopify

Type all thirteen digits into the barcode field on the variant. Include the check digit. It is part of the number, not a separator.

Do not add spaces, and do not drop the leading zero if there is one. A scanner reads the whole string, and a stored number that is one character different from the printed one will never match.

Where it goes wrong

Stores type the number under the bars by hand and transpose two digits. It looks right on screen and fails at the scanner every time. Scan the barcode into the field instead of reading it out loud to somebody at a keyboard.

The other one is a supplier feed with EAN-8 codes mixed in. Those are real barcodes for small packs, not broken EAN-13s, so do not pad them out to thirteen. Which barcode goes where covers the full set.