Continued from last month
………….. “Mars Bars ?”
“Yeah. How do they know our stuff’s not a Mars Bar ?”
“Well, for a start, none of it looks like one ! Do you mean how do you avoid using the same barcode as they might put on a Mars Bar ?”
“Yeah – that’s what I said”
I thought “No you didn’t” but, in the interests of customer relations, refrained from saying so.
It’s Deborah. She’s concerned that they don’t choose barcodes that clash with those on somebody else’s products, and it’s an interesting point. If you want to put bar codes on your products how DO you avoid using ones that are the same as a Mars Bar or a packet of corn flakes. Should your potential customer be a supermarket or retail chain then it’s almost certain that they will insist that your products are coded in a way that guarantees that there will be no possibility of confusion with any other items. Imagine if, at a checkout with a long queue of customers, you’re buying something priced at £20.00 and the EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) equipment thinks it’s a Mars Bar at 45 pence. Or, even worse, the other way round and they want to charge you £20 for something that should be cheaper. Or, even worse than that, suppose you’re using one of the serve yourself “please scan your next item” speaking checkouts. It would be chaotic.
Well the short answer is you use an official EAN13 bar code – EAN stands for European Article Number and the bar codes are, big surprise, 13 digits long. How do you know what number to use ? Well you could buy your bar codes from somebody like www.officialeancode.com who will sell you one (yes that’s a WHOLE SINGLE ONE) for $89. If, like Jason, you have a product range comprising over 2500 products the bill would come to over £100,000 at current exchange rates. If I tell Jason that’s what it’s going to cost then I’ll be visiting him in hospital after the heart attack. Note that sites like this DO sell official codes but they’re not “official” organisations.
The proper way to do it is to join your country’s branch of the GS1 organisation – these are the people who administer and oversee the use of EAN codes. Fees are based on turnover so Jason’s costs would be around £300 to join and an annual subscription of under £200. For that you get allocated a unique company ID number that forms the first half of the code (including the country ID) and a range of up to 100,000 unique codes for you to allocate to your individual products as you see fit. That’s more like it.
If you want to find out the origins and, possibly, some product details about any item coded using this method then you can do so by logging onto www.gs1uk.org then selecting Tools & Resources > Number Search. Type in 5010265000054 which is the code number on a packet of Ryvita biscuits (the posh ones with sesame seeds stuck on) and you’ll find that the product originated from Allied Bakeries Ltd in Liverpool.
So, all items sold in supermarkets and the like have EAN13 barcodes do they ? Well, not exactly. Take Computer Shopper for instance. It has a 13 digit numeric code (plus a little 2 digit one for the issue number) and the GS1 site doesn’t recognise it for the simple reason it’s not a GS1 EAN code. Periodical publications have to use a different system. Anyone publishing printed material in the UK is legally obliged to file a copy with the British Library. Goodness knows
………….. “Mars Bars ?”
“Yeah. How do they know our stuff’s not a Mars Bar ?”
“Well, for a start, none of it looks like one ! Do you mean how do you avoid using the same barcode as they might put on a Mars Bar ?”
“Yeah – that’s what I said”
I thought “No you didn’t” but, in the interests of customer relations, refrained from saying so.
It’s Deborah. She’s concerned that they don’t choose barcodes that clash with those on somebody else’s products, and it’s an interesting point. If you want to put bar codes on your products how DO you avoid using ones that are the same as a Mars Bar or a packet of corn flakes. Should your potential customer be a supermarket or retail chain then it’s almost certain that they will insist that your products are coded in a way that guarantees that there will be no possibility of confusion with any other items. Imagine if, at a checkout with a long queue of customers, you’re buying something priced at £20.00 and the EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) equipment thinks it’s a Mars Bar at 45 pence. Or, even worse, the other way round and they want to charge you £20 for something that should be cheaper. Or, even worse than that, suppose you’re using one of the serve yourself “please scan your next item” speaking checkouts. It would be chaotic.
Well the short answer is you use an official EAN13 bar code – EAN stands for European Article Number and the bar codes are, big surprise, 13 digits long. How do you know what number to use ? Well you could buy your bar codes from somebody like www.officialeancode.com who will sell you one (yes that’s a WHOLE SINGLE ONE) for $89. If, like Jason, you have a product range comprising over 2500 products the bill would come to over £100,000 at current exchange rates. If I tell Jason that’s what it’s going to cost then I’ll be visiting him in hospital after the heart attack. Note that sites like this DO sell official codes but they’re not “official” organisations.
The proper way to do it is to join your country’s branch of the GS1 organisation – these are the people who administer and oversee the use of EAN codes. Fees are based on turnover so Jason’s costs would be around £300 to join and an annual subscription of under £200. For that you get allocated a unique company ID number that forms the first half of the code (including the country ID) and a range of up to 100,000 unique codes for you to allocate to your individual products as you see fit. That’s more like it.
If you want to find out the origins and, possibly, some product details about any item coded using this method then you can do so by logging onto www.gs1uk.org then selecting Tools & Resources > Number Search. Type in 5010265000054 which is the code number on a packet of Ryvita biscuits (the posh ones with sesame seeds stuck on) and you’ll find that the product originated from Allied Bakeries Ltd in Liverpool.
So, all items sold in supermarkets and the like have EAN13 barcodes do they ? Well, not exactly. Take Computer Shopper for instance. It has a 13 digit numeric code (plus a little 2 digit one for the issue number) and the GS1 site doesn’t recognise it for the simple reason it’s not a GS1 EAN code. Periodical publications have to use a different system. Anyone publishing 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 all Shoppers that I’ve written stuff in and it’s a bloody enormous pile (246 of them) 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 simply says it’s a tip.
Anyway, I digress. The British Library will register a publisher and issue them with a unique publication ID called the ISSN- note this is per publication not per publisher. So the ISSN does not have the same function as the first bit of your EAN code They do this for free which is a miracle in today’s bureaucratic state where they charge you £70 for a passport and £8 a day to drive down a London Street. The first part of the code is always 977 – that identifies the item as a periodical. The next seven digits are the ISSN. The next two (ie digits 11 & 12) are called the sequence variant which increases by one every time the price goes up. Digit 13 is a check digit. The last two, making 15 in total, give you the issue number 0-12 for monthlies and 1-52 for weeklies. As well as the obvious use at shop checkouts the information is collected to provide data for the ABC circulation statistics.
The sharp eyed among you will notice a potential design flaw in this schema – there’s no place to store the year of publication. And, if you think that would result in, say, successive January issues of the same magazine bearing the same bar code (assuming no price increases) then you’d be right. I checked this looking at January 2005 and 2006 issues of Guitarist (what a hoarder I am !) and they’re both coded 977095370209201. But nobody seems to mind too much – maybe because most retailers won’t be selling magazines a year old and current issues at the same time.
Then there are books which also use a 13 digit code for the unique ISBN – also not recognised by the GS1UK product search.
Yet another variation on the theme seems to be some supermarket “own brand” goods. A jar of Asda Crab Spread, for instance, bears the code W27325353G which isn’t an EAN code (only 10 characters long and has alphanumerics) – if anyone knows what system this follows please let me know.
Anyway, Deborah’s now happy we can ensure that all her codes are unique and we can get the labels on the packs. What about the sales order entry product code look up (see last month). Well she’s lost enthusiasm for the pseudo web page system. Jason took one look at the projection for the cost of keeping it up to date and had some fairly strong views which he communicated “vigorously”. Instead we’ve come up with a scheme where the system remembers what a customer orders regularly and offers those items as a separate look up menu. As most customers buy regularly from a limited sub-set of products there’s usually no need to do an extensive search when entering an order so this speeds order entry considerably. And we’ve added a routine to print bar code labels for production batches.
The phone rings. “Hi - it’s Jason. Right ? About the barcodes. Yeah. They’re right now – right ? Yeah. Thanks.”
It’s nice to be appreciated now & then – right ?
Anyway, I digress. The British Library will register a publisher and issue them with a unique publication ID called the ISSN-
The sharp eyed among you will notice a potential design flaw in this schema – there’s no place to store the year of publication. And, if you think that would result in, say, successive January issues of the same magazine bearing the same bar code (assuming no price increases) then you’d be right. I checked this looking at January 2005 and 2006 issues of Guitarist (what a hoarder I am !) and they’re both coded 977095370209201. But nobody seems to mind too much – maybe because most retailers won’t be selling magazines a year old and current issues at the same time.
Then there are books which also use a 13 digit code for the unique ISBN – also not recognised by the GS1UK product search.
Yet another variation on the theme seems to be some supermarket “own brand” goods. A jar of Asda Crab Spread, for instance, bears the code W27325353G which isn’t an EAN code (only 10 characters long and has alphanumerics) – if anyone knows what system this follows please let me know.
Anyway, Deborah’s now happy we can ensure that all her codes are unique and we can get the labels on the packs. What about the sales order entry product code look up (see last month). Well she’s lost enthusiasm for the pseudo web page system. Jason took one look at the projection for the cost of keeping it up to date and had some fairly strong views which he communicated “vigorously”. Instead we’ve come up with a scheme where the system remembers what a customer orders regularly and offers those items as a separate look up menu. As most customers buy regularly from a limited sub-
The phone rings. “Hi -
It’s nice to be appreciated now & then – right ?
Under Development from Issue 250 of Computer Shopper Magazine