Barcodes when half your suppliers don't print them

One number per variant, not per product

The rule people get wrong first: under GS1 standards, each product variant needs its own Global Trade Item Number. Every size, every colour, every flavour. A 500 ml bottle and a 1 litre bottle of the same thing are two GTINs.

Businesses that barcode a product family with a single number discover the problem at the first stock count, when the system knows it holds 340 bottles and cannot say how many of each size. Variants are not a display preference; they are the level at which stock exists.

Item, case, pallet

There are different GTIN formats for different levels of packaging, and for anyone buying by the case and selling by the piece this is the useful part:

Scanning the case code on receiving and the item code at the till is what lets one system record a purchase in cartons and a sale in pieces without anyone doing the division by hand.

Where an Ethiopian business gets numbers

There is no local GS1 Member Organisation office; Ethiopia is served through GS1 Global Office, and any GS1 Member Organisation can handle a subscription. You will also find resellers offering individual barcode numbers cheaply. Those are usually numbers subdivided from someone else's company prefix, which works until a trading partner checks the registry and finds the number belongs to another business.

Whether that matters depends entirely on what you are doing with it, which brings us to the honest answer for local goods.

Internal codes are fine, and they are not GTINs

For a product you buy from a local supplier and sell in your own shops, you do not need a GTIN at all. Generate your own internal code, print your own label, scan it. It works perfectly for receiving, counting, transferring and selling.

The line to hold is this: an internal code is for your stock control. The moment goods you have labelled go onto someone else's shelf — a wholesale customer, a marketplace, a chain — they need a real GTIN, because the number has to be unique across everybody's systems and not just yours. Using an internal code there creates a collision that surfaces as somebody else's product in your sales report.

Scanning without buying scanners

The camera in a mid-range phone reads EAN-13 and DataMatrix reliably at counter distance. For a shop with two tills and a stockroom, that is usually the whole hardware question answered — and it means a stock count can be done by three people with their own phones rather than one person with the only scanner.