Rthe1st
commented
3 years ago On manufacturer codes
GS1 UK offer free manufacturer lookup to members, but the cheapest membership is 100 pounds. (comes with 100 free barcodes!) https://www.gs1uk.org/our-services/data-services/gepir
On number of manufacturers:
Search more than 40,000 GS1 UK members and over two million members globallyWe won't be able to distinguish different manufacturers without a lookup service as the manufacturer code is variable length
Your Company Prefix will contain between 6 and 11 digits – depending on how many GTINs you needhttps://www.gs1uk.org/support/getting-started/getting-started-in-retail/step-1
Once we know a manufacturers prefix, we don't need to lookup anything in that name space again. So I think our best bet might be to use a barcode lookup API to do that and assuming most products come from a small set of manufacturers, cost should be too bad.
Initially we can manually populated the manufacturer code for a few supermarkets extra and say we only support those.
I used this app to get the one for waitrose by scanning some parsnips, their code is 5000169 (500 is a uk prefix, so 0169 is theirs specifically) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.gs1.iGepirPaid&hl=en_GB&gl=US
EDIT: we wont be able to use the proper GS1 UK lookup because it costs 2500 pounds
https://www.gs1uk.org/our-services/data-services/gtin-check
EDIT 2: this company would let us do 50,000 queries a month for 39 euros, which according to GS1 UK above would cover every uk registered manufacturer, sounds pretty good (long as we don't care about per product details)
to test:
Plan: