Barcodes in South Africa

South African Barcodes

Most retailers in South Africa will accept both EAN-13 and UPC-A barcodes. Retailers may also require ITF-14 barcodes if you are supplying your products in bulk.

For books and magazines, you will first need to get your ISBN or ISSN number and link that to a retail barcode that can then be used in retail stores.

EAN-13 barcodes are 13-digits long and although UPC-A barcodes are 12-digits long, they can be converted to EAN-13 barcodes by simply adding a 0 (zero) at the beginning of the barcode (extending them to 13-digits). This does not the work the other way round – you cannot convert from EAN-13 to UPC-A (unless the barcode was originally UPC-A) because original EAN-13 barcodes contain a specific prefix indicating country of origin. For South Africa, this prefix is either 600 or 601.

UPC-A is used mainly in North America, so if you are exporting to that region of the world you would not need to convert your UPC-A to EAN-13.