GTIN: what is a Global Trade Item Number?
A GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) is the standardised identifier that designates a product uniquely worldwide. It is the number encoded in an EAN barcode, and the key on which all product traceability rests.
What a GTIN is for
A GTIN identifies one precise commercial reference: a product, in a given pack size, from a given brand. Two formats of the same product — a 75 cl bottle and a 37.5 cl one — carry two distinct GTINs.
That uniqueness is what lets a checkout recognise an item, a warehouse track stock, and a shopper reach the right product page after a scan.
The four GTIN lengths
- GTIN-13: the most common format in Europe, encoded by an EAN-13 barcode.
- GTIN-8: a short format, reserved for packaging too small for an EAN-13.
- GTIN-12: the North American format, encoded by a UPC-A barcode.
- GTIN-14: identifies a logistic unit — a case, a pallet — containing several consumer units.
A shorter GTIN can always be written on 14 digits by padding it with leading zeros. Most information systems use that normalised form.
How to obtain a GTIN
GTINs are allocated by GS1, the organisation that maintains these standards. A brand joins its national organisation, receives a company prefix, and numbers its own references from there.
A GTIN is never invented and never recycled: reassigning an old code to a new product corrupts reference data all along the chain, from the checkout to marketplaces.
GTIN and the product page
The GTIN is the pivot between physical packaging and digital content. It is what a GS1 Digital Link QR code encodes, and what makes it possible to serve the right product page to whoever scans it.
In QLabel, every product is created from its GTIN, unique within your organisation, and the link between the scanned code and the public page is established automatically.