Behind bars

Posted on 8 Oct 2008 at 10:15

 

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How does a barcode scanner tell the difference between a Mars bar and a piece of industrial machinery? David Robinson plays the numbers game to find out.

Deborah's on the phone, talking about the barcodes for her company's range of products.

"Yeah. How do they know our stuff's not a Mars bar?"

"Well for a start," I say, "none of it looks like one. Do you mean how do you avoid using the same barcode they might put on a Mars bar?"

"Yeah, that's what I said."

No you didn't, I think, but in the interests of customer relations I refrain from saying so.

Deborah's worried that they might choose barcodes that clash with those on somebody else's products, and it's an interesting point. If you want to put barcodes on your products, how do you avoid using the same ones that appear on a Mars bar or a box of corn flakes? If your potential customer is a supermarket or retail chain, they will almost certainly insist that your products are coded in a way that guarantees there is no possibility of confusion with any other items. Imagine if, at a checkout with a long queue of customers, you buy something priced at £20 and the electronic point of sale (EPOS) equipment thinks it's a Mars bar that costs 45p. Worse, imagine it wants to charge you £20 for something that costs 45p. Even worse than that, suppose you're using one of the self-service checkouts? It would be chaotic.

All bar one

The short answer is that you use an official EAN13 barcode (EAN stands for European Article Number, and the barcodes are 13 digits long). How do you know which number to use? You could buy your barcodes from a website such as www.officialeancode.com, which will sell you one (yes, that's one whole barcode) for $89 (around £50). If, like Jason - the owner of the company that Deborah works for - you have a range of over 2,500 products, the bill would come to around £125,000 at current exchange rates. If I tell Jason that's what it will cost, I'll be visiting him in hospital after the heart attack.

The proper way to do it is to join your country's branch of the GS1 organisation, which administers the use of EAN codes. Fees are based on turnover, so Jason's costs would be around £300 to join, plus an annual subscription of less than £200. For that you're allocated a unique company ID number, which forms the first half of the code (including the country ID), and up to 100,000 unique codes to allocate to your products as you see fit.

If you want to find out the origin and product details of any item coded using this method, you can do so by logging on to www.gs1uk.org and selecting Tools & Resources, Number Search. Type in 5010265000054, which is the code number on a packet of Ryvita biscuits, and you'll find that the product originated from Allied Bakeries Ltd in Liverpool.

Periodical table

So all items sold in supermarkets have EAN13 barcodes, do they? Well, not exactly. Take Computer Shopper, for instance. It has a 13-digit numeric code (plus two digits for the issue number), and the GS1 site doesn't recognise it for the simple reason that it's not a GS1 EAN code. Periodical publications use a different system. Anyone who publishes printed material in the UK is legally obliged to file a copy with the British Library. Goodness knows what they do with it all; I have a copy of every Shopper I've written for (246 of them) and it's a bloody enormous pile in the upstairs part of the garage. (Yes, I know it's showing off to have a two-storey garage, but it's not as posh as it sounds, and Mrs R says it's just a tip.)