Barcoding Your Products

Barcodes are an essential way for us to prevent human error and ensure orders are shipped correctly to your customers. All products are required to be barcoded when shipping them to Ship Essential. This enables Ship Essential to use product barcodes throughout our warehouse. All Ship Essential barcodes must be printed in black ink on white, non-reflective labels. Additionally, unclear barcodes will not be scannable.

 🔑 Once you choose a barcode for each product, it cannot be changed. So it’s imperative it is correct.

Supported Barcodes:

1. Shopping Cart Barcode: unique alphanumeric string that is manually created in Shopify with a max character limit of 20 characters and printed in the Code128 format.

   • We also recommend using the Retail Barcode Labels Shopify App to easily generate barcode values.

2. Manufacturer Barcode

   • Currently accepted formats are:

     • UPC (GTIN-12)

     • EAN (GTIN-13)

     • ISBN (Post 2007)

     • GTIN-14

Barcodes must be easily scannable and securely adhered to every sellable unit. Poorly attached barcodes or barcodes folded over edges will require relabeling and incur associated fees.

The minimum size of a barcode is 0.3" wide (keep in mind this is the physical barcode size, not the label). If you are adjusting the size of the barcode by zooming in or out to fit a physical label size, the barcode itself can be reduced by up to 80% and can be increased by up to 200%.)

Other than the barcodes you have selected for the product within Ship Essential, all other visible barcodes MUST be removed or completed covered. This is extremely important to prevent mis-scans and mis-picks during fulfillment. In other words, your product can only have multiple scannable / visible barcodes if all these barcodes are in Ship Essential's system.

We recommend printing barcodes with black ink on a white background, with a minimum height for the barcode image itself of 0.5" and width of 1" for scanning ability.

Additionally, the quiet zone should be a minimum of 0.125” on each side of the barcode symbol (pictured below).

 🔑 Quiet Zone: The blank margins on either side of a barcode that is used to tell the barcode scanner where the barcode symbology starts and stops.

All text below the barcode bars should be 12 pt font.

Please locate your barcode in a place that is easily visible. See the images below for examples.