#Free barcode maker generator#

While a business determines its own SKUs, UPCs are issued by GS1, a non-profit agency specifically dedicated to product number assignment for supply chains. UPCs are considered 'universal' because they serve to identify products no matter where they are being sold. A SKU is a Stock Keeping Unit used for inventory management within a business and is specific to your own store, while a UPC is intended as a global identifier for a certain product that may be carried by any number of retailers.

#Free barcode maker generator#

Shift4Shop also has a free QR code generator for your business.Ī UPC is a Universal Product Code and should not be confused with a SKU. The most commonly known 2-dimensional barcode is the QR code, which users scan with their mobile device to be brought instantly to a specific website. There are also 2-dimensional barcodes which appear as a series of blocks, and serve different data encoding purposes than 1-dimensional barcodes. Manufacturing, healthcare, and other industries also have specific barcode types.ġ-dimensional barcodes are called such because they consist of a series of vertical stripes. Supply chain industries use Code 128 barcodes which aren't intended for scanning at a POS, but rather for shipping and ordering within the logistics process. For example, Code 3 of 9 (shortened as Code39) barcodes are used by the automotive industry as well as the US Department of Defense. Many other types of barcodes are specific to certain industries, each of which needs to encode different types of data relating to its purposes. Consumer goods in Europe frequently use the EAN barcode, which encodes data in a slightly different format, but UPC-A barcodes are acceptable in most countries. This is a 1-dimensional barcode commonly used around the world, especially in the United States. The type of barcode created by our generator is a UPC-A barcode.