Types of codes: for products, locations or shipping goods

GS1 codes are unique numbers that only get meaning when you assign them to articles, capture and share them with your trading partners.

Which codes you need depends on what you are going to encode: articles, locations, shipping units or something else?

When you have your codes, you can translate them into a symbol (known as the barcode) to make the it scanable. This is necessary if your products go through a checkout

Most widely used: the 13-digit code

The 13-digit code (or GTIN-13, EAN-13) is most commonly used.
This allows you to encode your products (as well as locations). Almost all packaged products have an EAN-13 code, such as a pack of milk, a drilling machine and paracetamol.

Coding locations: GS1 location code (GLN)

A GS1 location code is also called Global Location Number (GLN). 
It is a number of 13 positions that identifies a business address as a unique address. You can assign a location code to an internal location (e.g. warehouse rack or conveyor belt) or an external business location (e.g. in case of various branches of your company).

GLNs are the "key" for retrieving information from databases. The associated name, address information, and other data associated with this unique number.

Shipping goods: GS1 despatch code (SSCC)

The GS1 despatch code, Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC), is a unique coding for shipments.
This code is assigned to a shipment and expires as soon as the shipment reaches its destination and the pallet is destacked.

You can assign this code to a shipment and it will expire if the shipment has reached its destination and the shipment has been posted.

Read more about all the codes GS1 offers on the GS1 Global website.