A barcode is not a productivity feature. It is a data-integrity feature. Every time a person reads a code off a packet and types it into a screen, there is a chance the digits come out wrong, and a wrong code does not fail loudly. It silently decrements the wrong product, prices the sale incorrectly, and leaves two SKUs misstated until someone counts them.
Scanning removes that failure mode at the point where it starts. It also happens to be faster, which is the benefit most buyers notice first and the least important of the two.
This guide covers the decisions in the order you actually have to make them: what to encode, which symbology, what hardware, how to design the label, and how to roll it out without labelling your catalogue twice.
Key Takeaways
- Decide what you are encoding before you buy anything. An internal SKU and a supplier GTIN serve different purposes, and most businesses need to store both.
- If you sell through other retailers, you need a GS1 Company Prefix. GTINs are built from that prefix, and its length determines how many products you can identify (GS1, retrieved 2026-08-13).
- For internal-only codes, GS1 reserves specific prefix ranges for restricted circulation, including 020 to 029, 040 to 049, and 200 to 299 (List of GS1 country codes, retrieved 2026-08-13). Bangladesh's assigned prefix is 894.
- Match the symbology to the job. EAN-13 for retail units, ITF-14 for cartons, Code 128 or GS1-128 where you need batch and expiry, DataMatrix where space is tight.
- Roll out by value, not alphabetically. Label your fastest-moving items first and you get most of the benefit in the first week.
Step 1: Decide What the Barcode Encodes
This is the decision that everything else depends on, and the one most often skipped.
There are two distinct identifiers, and confusing them creates problems that surface months later.
A GTIN, or Global Trade Item Number, identifies a product globally. It is built from a GS1 Company Prefix, which is a globally unique code licensed to your business, and the length of that prefix determines how many unique products you can identify (GS1, retrieved 2026-08-13). GS1 also notes that prefixes do not indicate country of origin, which is worth knowing before someone in your team draws conclusions from the first three digits.
An internal SKU identifies a product within your business. You control it, it costs nothing, and it means nothing outside your walls.
Which you need depends on where your goods go:
| Situation | What to use |
|---|---|
| You manufacture or brand goods sold through other retailers | GTIN from your own GS1 Company Prefix |
| You resell branded goods that already carry a barcode | Store the supplier's GTIN against your item |
| You sell loose, unbranded, or repacked goods only in your own shops | Internal SKU on a restricted-circulation prefix |
| You do all three | All of the above, on one item master |
For internal codes, use the ranges GS1 reserves for the purpose. Prefixes 020 to 029 and 200 to 299 cover restricted circulation numbers within a geographic region, and 040 to 049 covers restricted circulation within a company (List of GS1 country codes, retrieved 2026-08-13). Using these ranges means your internal codes can never collide with a real product's GTIN, which is the exact failure that occurs when someone invents codes starting at 1001.
One item record should hold both identifiers. Your system should let you scan either the supplier's barcode or your own label and land on the same product.
Step 2: Choose the Symbology
Symbology is the encoding pattern, the visual grammar of bars and spaces. Different jobs need different ones.
EAN-13 is the default for retail consumer units outside North America. Thirteen digits, numeric only, universally readable by retail scanners.
UPC-A is the twelve-digit North American equivalent. Store it if your suppliers use it; you rarely need to generate it.
EAN-8 is the short form for packages too small for EAN-13. Use it only when the label area genuinely will not take a full symbol.
ITF-14 encodes a fourteen-digit identifier and is designed for outer cartons and cases. It prints reliably on corrugated board, which EAN-13 does not. If you receive or ship by the case, this is the one for your cartons.
Code 128 handles letters as well as digits and is variable length, which makes it the workhorse for internal labels, bin locations, and anything carrying a reference number rather than a product identifier.
GS1-128 is Code 128 with Application Identifiers, standardised codes that let one barcode carry a product identifier plus a batch number plus an expiry date, each tagged so the scanner knows what it received. If you handle pharmaceuticals, food, or anything with a shelf life, this is the specification to ask your software vendor about by name.
GS1 DataMatrix is a 2D symbol that packs the same structured data into a much smaller area. Standard on small pharmaceutical packaging and increasingly common wherever label space is short. It requires an imaging scanner, not a laser.
A practical default for a Bangladeshi retailer or wholesaler: EAN-13 for retail units, ITF-14 for cartons, Code 128 for internal and location labels, and GS1-128 or DataMatrix only where batch and expiry tracking is required.
Step 3: Choose the Hardware
Hardware choices are less consequential than they appear, provided you avoid a few specific mistakes.
Scanners
Laser scanners read 1D barcodes only. Inexpensive, fast on clean labels, and adequate for a counter that only handles EAN-13.
Imaging scanners read 1D and 2D, cope better with damaged or poorly printed labels, and read from phone screens. The price gap has narrowed to the point where buying laser-only is usually a false economy. If you will ever handle DataMatrix or QR, this is not optional.
Wireless scanners matter for goods receipt and stock counting, where the operator moves and the computer does not. Check the battery life and the range against your actual godown, not the datasheet.
Phone cameras work for low-volume counting and are effectively free. They are too slow for a busy counter and the battery will not last a shift.
Label printers
Direct thermal printers need no ribbon and are cheap to run. The print fades with heat, sunlight and time, typically within months. Correct for shelf-edge labels, price stickers, and anything with fast turnover. Wrong for anything stored long term or exposed to sun.
Thermal transfer printers use a ribbon and produce labels that survive years, heat and handling. Correct for asset tags, carton labels, warehouse bin locations, and slow-moving stock.
Buy thermal transfer if you are buying one printer. The consumable cost difference is small against the cost of relabelling a godown because the bin labels faded.
Label stock
Match the adhesive to the surface and the environment. Freezer stock, oily packaging, and rough cartons each need different adhesive. Ask your label supplier for samples and stick them on your actual products for a week before ordering a pallet. This costs nothing and prevents the most annoying possible outcome, which is thousands of labels that fall off.
Step 4: Design the Label
Five rules cover most label failures.
Leave the quiet zone. The blank margin either side of the symbol is part of the symbol. Crowding it with a border or another element is the most common cause of a label that will not scan, and it is invisible to the person who designed it.
Print big enough. Shrinking a barcode to fit a small label produces bars too narrow for the scanner to resolve. If it does not fit at a readable size, change symbology rather than scale.
Keep the contrast high. Black on white. Not dark blue on cream, not black on kraft brown. Scanners read contrast, and coloured stock reduces it.
Print the human-readable text. The digits under the bars are what saves a sale when a label is scratched. Never suppress them.
Include what the operator needs. Product name, and depending on context, price, size or colour variant, batch and expiry for regulated goods, and the location code for bin labels. Resist adding more. A cluttered label slows down the human, and the human is usually the bottleneck.
Test before you commit. Print ten labels, scan each one five times with the scanner your staff will actually use, at the angle and distance they will actually use, in the lighting your shop actually has. A label that scans on a designer's desk and fails under a shop's fluorescent tube is a common and expensive discovery.
Step 5: Roll Out in the Right Order
Labelling an entire catalogue before going live is how barcode projects stall. Sequence it instead.
Week 1: Clean the item master. Deduplicate products, fix units of measure, and record supplier GTINs where they exist. Barcoding a messy catalogue makes the mess permanent and scannable.
Week 2: Label your A-class items. The top 20% of items by value or velocity usually account for most transactions. Labelling them first captures most of the benefit immediately and gives staff a reason to keep going.
Week 3: Scan at goods receipt. This is where barcoding pays back fastest, because it catches errors at the point of entry rather than at the counter. Every item that arrives correctly identified is an error that never reaches your stock records.
Week 4: Scan at the point of sale. By now, your fast movers are labelled and your receiving process is producing correctly identified stock, so counter scanning works from day one rather than failing on every third item.
Ongoing: label on receipt. Make labelling part of goods receipt for anything that arrives without a scannable code. New stock gets labelled once, at intake, by the person already handling it. Retrofitting labels to existing stock happens gradually during cycle counts, which you should be running anyway. Multi-warehouse inventory management covers how to structure those counts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to buy barcodes from GS1?
Only if your products are sold by other businesses. Retailers and marketplaces require GTINs built on a licensed GS1 Company Prefix (GS1, retrieved 2026-08-13). If you sell only through your own shops, internal codes on a restricted-circulation prefix are appropriate and free. Buying resold or second-hand barcode numbers from third-party sellers is a false economy, because major retailers verify GTIN ownership.
What if my supplier's products have no barcode?
Print your own. This is normal for loose goods, local manufacture and repacked items, and it is the main reason to have a label printer rather than relying on supplier barcodes. Assign an internal code from a restricted-circulation range and label at goods receipt.
Can I use the same barcode for two variants of a product?
No. Different size, colour, or pack quantity means a different product for inventory purposes and needs a different identifier. Sharing one code between variants means you can never know what you actually hold, which defeats the entire exercise.
How do I handle products sold by weight?
Weighed items generally use a variable-measure barcode printed at the scale, which encodes the item identifier together with the weight or price. Confirm that your POS and your scales agree on the format before buying either, since this is a common integration gap.
Will barcoding make my stock accurate on its own?
No. It removes transcription errors at the points where you scan, which is a large share of them. It does nothing about theft, damage, unrecorded transfers, or units that never got scanned at all. Barcoding plus disciplined cycle counting produces accuracy; barcoding alone produces faster wrong numbers.
Does my POS need to be online to scan?
It should not. Scanning is a local lookup against a product catalogue, and a well-built system caches that catalogue on the device so it keeps working during an outage. This matters in Bangladesh specifically, where rural internet penetration is 36.5% against 71.4% in urban areas (Future Startup, retrieved 2026-08-13).
Getting Started
Start with the identifier decision, because it is the only one that is expensive to reverse. Work out whether you need GTINs, internal codes, or both, and set the rule for how new products get a code before you print anything.
Then pick your symbologies, buy an imaging scanner and a thermal transfer printer, design one label and test it on your real products, and roll out by value over four weeks.
The wider system context is covered in the Bangladesh inventory software buyer's guide. If your barcodes will also drive VAT-compliant invoices at the counter, Mushak 6.3 invoicing from your POS explains how the product record should carry the tax rate so one scan produces a correct invoice line.
PicoStore generates barcodes, prints labels, and drives stock, pricing and VAT from a single scan. Start free and print your first label sheet today.
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