Impacts of Buying Barcodes from Unauthorised Sources

Below are some of such impacts:

1. Multiple vendors, increased costs
   One of the benefits of buying barcodes from GS1 India is the free access to DataKart service for managing product and barcode information. When you buy barcode numbers from an unauthorized source, you need to find and pay packaging and other vendors for encoding barcode numbers into barcode images, which eventually increases your overall cost.
    
2. Major retail channels only accept GS1 barcode numbers
   Most of the big retail channels in India, both offline and online, only accept products with GS1 barcode numbers to list in their systems (item masters) and avoid scanning issues at the checkout counters. In such cases, barcodes bought from unauthorised sources becomes unusable, therefore, compelling the brand owner to scrap their entire product packaging along with the old barcodes and replace it with new barcode numbers (procured from GS1 India) and new packaging carrying the same.