The Hines Site

I have been asked by several folks how to get UPC barcodes for products they plan to sell to retail or wholesale businesses.  It really isn’t a big deal now that I look back but I did take some digging on the ‘net.

First, I googled “buy barcodes” and found lots of info.  You can buy a UPC company prefix from the official site – GS1 – here:   http://barcodes.gs1us.org/dnn_bcec/Default.aspx 

What is a company prefix?  It is the first 6 digits in the 12 digit code.  When you register with GS1, you buy the exclusive 6 digit company prefix and then you assign the remaining 6 digits to your products.  You essentially get 999,999 potential barcodes!  These will cost you from $150 to $1,500 depending on your company’s revenue.  It takes you about two days to get the company prefix and you get the data generator to generate your barcode image which will be in a TIF format or some other form that you can treat like any other image you can then incorporate into your products’ labels.

Now, unless you are needing dozens of barcodes, what you may be more interested in is buying individual codes from someone who already has a company prefix and is willing to sell you one or more of their own to you.  After all, they originally had 999,999 unique numbers and may have only used, say, a hundred of the them). 

I purchased mine from Mozian and was quite satisfied for the price of $29.95.   http://www.mozian.com/upc.html 

After purchasing, my barcodes came the next day via email and I then imported the files to my Print Shop label.  The barcodes were larger than I needed so I converted them into an image I could cut and paste; shrink or enlarge.  You can do this easily in print shop or Adobe Photoshop.  Just make sure the vertical lines stay intact (mine are no more than 1/4″ high and maybe an inch long).  You can make them fatter, taller, thinner or whatever but make sure all the lines are there. 

Make note of the actual numbers at the bottom of the code so you can put them in, too.  These are for when a barcode doesn’t scan for some reason and the store cashier will enter them in by hand (We have all seen this happen from time to time).  Hint:  Make the numbers big enough for those of us who are nearsighted!

There is no big mystery.  The GS1 or Mozian may ask you what kinds of products you will be coding but that’s no biggie.  Obviously, Mozian, who originally bought their company prefix code from GS1 in order to have codes for their music, has sold hundreds if not thousands of codes to folks like me who sell granola bars.

Hope this helped get you started.

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