Barcodes for Inventory and Shipping: A Small-Business Primer

Barcodes are the cheapest automation a small business can adopt. A label printer, a roll of stickers, and a phone app turn inventory counts from a Saturday of pen-and-paper into an afternoon of scanning. Barcodes don't require a fancy system — they're just machine-readable numbers, and any spreadsheet can hold the data those numbers represent. The barrier is usually confusion about which kind of barcode to use, not the cost.

Which barcode to use

• Code 128 — the workhorse. Encodes numbers and letters, compact, and used everywhere from internal SKUs to shipping labels. If you're generating internal labels, this is usually the right choice.
• UPC-A / EAN-13 — the retail standards. If your product will be sold through a retailer, distributor, or marketplace that requires GS1 codes, you need these — and they require a registered GS1 prefix (or a marketplace-issued code), not just a random number.
• Code 39 — older and roomier, still common in industrial and government settings. Fine for asset tags, but Code 128 is denser.
• ITF-14 — used on cartons and pallets for retail distribution.

Generating, printing, scanning

1. Assign SKUs — a stable identifier per product or bin (e.g. 'SKU-1042'). Keep the code's data identical to what's in your spreadsheet; the barcode is only as good as the record behind it.
2. Generate — create the barcode with the right symbology, sized for your label (typically 1.5–2 cm tall, with margins).
3. Print a test label and scan it — verify the scanned value matches before printing a whole roll.
4. Print in bulk, affix, and scan items in with your phone or scanner — either into your spreadsheet, or better, into a lightweight inventory app that imports the scanned values.

A practical example: a home-based candle maker ships 50 orders a week. Each product gets a Code 128 label printed on a thermal label with the SKU and a human-readable name underneath. Incoming stock gets scanned into a spreadsheet; outgoing orders get a packing label scanned to confirm the item matches the order. The whole system costs a label printer and an afternoon to set up — and eliminates the manual-count errors that had been shipping the wrong scents to the wrong customers.