International Article Number

EAN barcodes are used worldwide for lookup at retail point of sale, but can also be used as numbers for other purposes such as wholesale ordering or accounting.

[1] An EAN-13 number includes a 3-digit GS1 prefix (indicating country of registration or special type of product).

The 13-digit EAN-13 number consists of four components:[4] The first three digits of the EAN-13 (GS1 Prefix) usually identify the GS1 Member Organization which the manufacturer has joined (not necessarily where the product is actually made).

more products sold by retailers outside the United States and Canada have been using EAN-13 codes beginning with 0, since they were generated by GS1-US.

Other retailers use at least part of this prefix for products which are packaged in store, for example, items weighed and served over a counter for a customer.

In these cases, the barcode may encode a price, quantity or weight along with a product identifier – in a retailer defined way.

Retailers who have historically used UPC barcodes tend to use GS1 prefixes starting with "02" for store-packaged products.

[7] In ISBN and ISSN, this component is used to identify the language in which the publication was issued and managed by a transnational agency covering several countries, or to identify the country where the legal deposits are made by a publisher registered with a national agency, and it is further subdivided any allocating subblocks for publishers; many countries have several prefixes allocated in the ISSN and ISBN registries.

The checksum is calculated as sum of products – taking an alternating weight value (3 or 1) times the value of each data digit.

The barcode consists of 95 areas (also called modules[citation needed]) of equal width.

This method reconstructs the full code from partial scans, useful when the barcode is obscured or damaged.

Additionally, modern scanners often employ omnidirectional scanning, enhancing their ability to read barcodes at various angles.

If errors are detected, the scanner can either alert the user or attempt correction, improving the reliability of scanning in dynamic or less-than-ideal conditions.

Japanese Article Number (JAN) is a barcode standard compatible with the EAN.

Originally, JAN was issued a flag code (EAN's number system) of 49.