What are EAN, UCC
and GS1?
EAN, UCC and GS1
are all commodity coding organizations or systems.
EAN is the
European Article Numbering Association, UCC is the United States
Uniform Code Committee, and GS1 is the Global Article Numbering
Organization. It is the new name after the merger of EAN and UCC.
GS1 is the
abbreviation of International Article Numbering Organization.
GS1 is a
non-profit international organization that develops and
maintains its own barcode standards and corresponding issuing
company prefixes. The most well-known of these standards is the
barcode, a symbol printed on a product that can be
electronically scanned.
GS1 has 116 local
member organizations and over 2 million user businesses. Its
main office is located in Brussels (Avenue Louise).
Both EAN and UCC
have developed a set of standards for using digital codes to
identify goods, services, assets and locations. These codes can
be represented by barcode symbols to facilitate electronic
reading required for business processes. GS1-128 barcode is the
new name of UCC/EAN-128 barcode. It is a subset of the Code 128
character set and complies with the international standard of
GS1. UPC and EAN are both commodity codes in the GS1 system. UPC
is mainly used in the United States and Canada, and EAN is
mainly used in other countries and regions, but they can be
converted to each other.
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