GTIN® is a registered trademark of GS1 that stands for ‘Global Trade Item Number’. It is also known as the GS1 barcode number for consumer products as this number is encoded in a product barcode.
GTIN provides unique identity to a product, globally, which acts as the key to several Retail applications, such as Point of Sale (PoS) billing, inventory management at retail outlets and distribution centres, and for traceability, product recall across supply chain trading partners.
GTIN is important since it is widely used and asked for worldwide by trading partners in Retail supply chains which include manufacturers, retailers, logistics providers, shopping portals/ecommerce companies etc and provides a common way of identifying products moving in the supply chain.
It is a unique number which cannot be duplicated and enables avoiding any incidence of ambiguity in identification of retailed consumer products. If internal, proprietary product codes are used, such ambiguity may frequently arise.
To get your GTINs, please register online or contact GS1 India.
No. GS1 India is the only authorised body in India for allocation GTINs. It has been set up as a standards organisation by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India, along with apex trade and Industry bodies, BIS. It is an affiliate of GS1 Global, a Belgium based GS1 organisation that oversees a network of 112 GS1 organisations worldwide.
GS1 Barcode is a 13 digit numeric code that starts with prefix ‘890’. This prefix number with the barcode symbol is registered as a trademark of GS1 India and its unauthorised issue/use would invite legal action.
Do not be misled by agencies/organisations claiming to provide GTINs at lower costs. You will get barcode numbers from them which will not be accepted by retailers/others.
GTINs facilitate unambiguous and universal identification of consumer products across the complete supply chain and enables market access to retailers, shopping websites/e-commerce portals worldwide.
With GTINs, brand owners/manufacturers gain higher visibility of their products through search engines, including Google.
Only product data of authorised GTINs is uploaded into GS1 India’s DataKart, which is the national repository of data on retailed products in India with attribute information.
DataKart is used by retailers, e-tailers, manufacturers, etc. in India for sourcing data on retailed items directly from manufacturers and is the only reliable, trusted source in the country.
Data from DataKart also gets populated to GS1 Cloud, the global repository of information on retailed product in the world, and is designed for extensive use by global retailers, buyers, e-tailers, brand owners, etc.
