Guide to Retail Barcodes

Everything you need to know about buying and using retail barcodes

Barcodes have many benefits which is why they are in retail stores around the world. These benefits include:

  • Quickly pulling up accurate pricing information at the checkout
  • Reducing human error by using an electronic scanner
  • Keeping track of stock changes in real time
  • Easy reordering when stock gets low

For these reasons and more, if you want to sell your product at a retail store they will likely request your product has a barcode. Of course, this whole system only functions because barcode numbers are kept unique. It is important to note that your barcode does not contain any details about your product, it is simply a unique number and image representing that number. Product information is input by the retailer when they add your item into their computer system.

To help you get started, we’ve created a free guide to barcodes that explains all you need to know including:

  1. the different formats of retail barcodes (EAN, UPC, ITF14, ISBN, ISSN)
  2. how to buy barcodes
  3. adding the barcodes to your products
  4. registering your barcodes and products with retailers and online databases

guide to retail barcodes

Download the Guide to retail barcodes – HKBC

Please also read our FAQs.

Then if you have any more barcode queries, you can also search our extensive Knowledge Base.

IBN logo Proudly brought to you by the International Barcode Network. Established in 2013, the IBN operates in 90+ countries, and 22 languages, with country-specific domain names and offices for most of these. The IBN head office is in New Zealand. Our Network has websites enabling the purchase of high-quality barcodes throughout the world.