Basically, you have two options available when it comes to obtaining barcodes:
- From the official international barcode organization GS1 (https://www.gs1.org/standards/get-barcodes)
- From resellers
Buying barcodes from resellers is less expensive than obtaining them from gs1 but this option has several disadvantages:
- Those barcodes don't have your company prefix (we will talk about this below)
- You can't make sure that those same barcodes are not sold to another company
- Several big vendors don't accept them (Walmart, ...)
This is why we always recommend obtaining barcodes directly from gs1. When you obtain barcodes from gs1, you actually purchase a prefix (a set of digits) that will be unique to your company. This company prefix will be used in all of your barcodes which makes them unique to your company and identifiable all over the world.