- Why join? What's my personal information used for?
-
Without an account, you can look up items by their UPC or EAN. You can
also submit updates for review. Creating an account on this site adds
the following features:
- Search by product description
- Update certain entries without review
- Track your submissions
- More planned...
The information you have to provide to create an account is minimal -- a
username, a valid email address, and a password. One email is sent to the
address immediately to confirm its validity, which shows me that you're
a human and not a piece of software, and prevents abuse or defacement
of my web site. I will never share your email address with a third party.
- Where do I go to download the whole database?
-
I do not offer the whole database for download. I also do not offer
subsets of the database (by category, brand, manufacturer, or anything
else) for download.
- I want to sell a product on Amazon, but they won't let me because
the product's not listed on this web site.
- I have no affiliation with Amazon, and I'm not familiar with any
of Amazon's policies for 3rd party sellers. You'll have to take it
up with Amazon.
- Why aren't my items in this database? How do I get items into this database?
- They aren't there because nobody -- you or anybody else -- has put
them there. Individually, you have to look up each item by number to add it or
submit a modification request. If you're in a position to contribute
more data than can be easily entered by hand, and you have permission
to share it, please contact me by email so we can work something out. I
can load an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file pretty easily.
- It looks like digits 2-6 of a UPC should identify a manufacturer.
Why isn't this always true?
-
Originally, the UCC gave out chunks of UPC number space in fixed sizes
of 100,000 numbers (5 digits). This meant the manufacturer could always
be determined by the 2nd through 6th digit, the "manufacturer code".
This was inefficient, but that didn't seem to matter until they started
to run out. So they started to give out smaller chunks, which meant
that the "manufacturer code" part was longer, and the "item code" part
was smaller, and that it looks like multiple manufacturers are sharing
certain manufacturer codes. Also, the original-sized chunks have been
split (and not cleanly) up as companies have been bought & sold, split &
combined, and their products have gone along with them.
- I signed up for an account, but never received an email to confirm,
or I've forgotten my username or password.
- Make sure that you provided your correct email address. Also check
that the message didn't get filtered as spam by your PC or your ISP.
An unconfirmed account will be removed in 10 days, and you can try signing
up again with the same username. You can also use the "forgot password"
page to re-send the confirmation code. This system does work -- it has
done so for many many people before you, so it's not likely that any
problem is on this end.
- How do I get a UPC code for my product?
- All I can tell you for certain is that this is not the place.
One answer is that you can become a member of GS1-US. But I've
seen ads (right here on this web site) for individual UPC codes.
That's all I have.
- I'm in desperate need of all of the UPCs for [a certain item / a complete
category of items / all items from a certain manufacturer / ...]. Do
you have such a list? Can you help me find such a list?
- If you can find it on the web site, then there it is. If not, then
I have no better way to find it than you do. Of course, if you find
what you're looking for, submitting it to me will share it with many
others, as others have already done for you.
- I'm looking for [ category codes / images / dimensions /
nutritional information / ... ]. Got anything like that?
- Nope. If I had it, I'd share it. I don't have a reliable source,
and many such attributes only have meaning in a certain category of
items.
- The site says the number I entered isn't a valid UPC/EAN13. But
I'm looking at the barcode right here. What gives?
-
There are many kinds of barcodes, used for many kinds of things. Believe
it or not, most of them aren't UPC or EAN13. And they're used
to encode many different things in a machine-readable form. There's good information
on Wikipedia about
SKUs
and part numbers.
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