A lot of small retailers and home-based sellers in Pakistan — especially the growing number running a shop through Instagram or Daraz — reach a point where they want proper barcode labels on their products. It looks more professional, and it makes stock-taking far less painful than typing product names into a spreadsheet by hand. Here's what actually matters when you start.

Pick the right format for the job

Not all barcodes are the same, and using the wrong one causes headaches later:

  • CODE128 is the most flexible option. It can encode letters, numbers and most symbols, which makes it the right default for internal stock labels — a SKU code, a batch number, an internal reference — where nobody outside your own shop needs to scan it.
  • EAN-13 is the standard you'll see on almost every retail product on a store shelf. If you plan to get your product into supermarkets or larger retail chains, they will generally expect a properly registered EAN-13 code.
  • UPC-A is the North American equivalent of EAN-13. You'll only need this if you're selling into markets that specifically require it.

The part sellers often get wrong

Here's the one that catches people out: generating a barcode that looks like a valid EAN-13 code is not the same as owning a registered one. EAN and UPC numbers are assigned by GS1, the global standards body, through a paid registration process tied to your specific company. If you print an EAN-13 barcode with a number you made up yourself, it will scan and display those digits correctly, but it may collide with a real product's registered number elsewhere in the world — which becomes a real problem the moment your product reaches a retailer's inventory system.

For internal stock control, this doesn't matter at all. Use CODE128 with your own SKU scheme and there's no conflict, because nobody outside your business is expected to recognise that number as a globally unique retail identifier.

For products you want stocked in retail chains, register through GS1 Pakistan first, then generate barcodes using the number range they assign you.

A simple labelling workflow that scales

  1. Decide on a SKU pattern early — something like CATEGORY-COLOUR-SIZE-0001 — before you have hundreds of products to retrofit.
  2. Generate CODE128 barcodes for every internal SKU. They're free to create and don't require registration.
  3. Keep a spreadsheet or simple database mapping each SKU to product details — the barcode itself only stores the code, not the product name or price.
  4. If a specific product graduates to retail shelves, register an EAN-13 for that product specifically through GS1, rather than assigning EAN-13s to everything by default.

Printing tips

Thermal label printers (common and inexpensive in Pakistan now) print CODE128 and EAN-13 cleanly at small sizes, but test a batch before committing to a full print run — barcode height needs to stay proportional to width for reliable scanning, and stretching a barcode image to fit a label template is a common cause of scan failures at checkout.