How do I buy a real GTIN?
A GTIN is your product's barcode number. It comes from GS1 — the nonprofit standards body, not a marketplace or a reseller site — and it belongs to you once you buy it.
Last checked Aug 2026.
Where GTINs actually come from
GTINs are licensed by GS1, the same global nonprofit that maintains the barcode standard itself. In the US, that's GS1 US, with its own online store; every other country has its own GS1 member organization (GS1 publishes an MO finder to locate the right one for your country). You're not buying a barcode image — you're buying a number, registered to your business in GS1's global registry, that you then use to generate your own barcode.
What it costs
Through the GS1 US store, a single GTIN costs $30, and a 10-pack company prefix (enough numbers for up to 10 products, with room to grow into more under the same prefix) costs $250. Other GS1 member organizations set their own pricing for their country — check your local GS1 MO's store rather than assuming US pricing applies. We haven't independently verified every country's current price, so treat the US figures above as the one we can confirm and confirm your own country's number before you buy.
Why not just buy a cheap number from a resale site?
You'll find sites reselling barcode numbers for a few dollars each, often numbers originally licensed to someone else's now-defunct prefix. Major marketplaces (Amazon among them) increasingly verify submitted GTINs against GS1's own registry before accepting a listing, and a reseller-sourced number that isn't registered to you will fail that check and get the listing rejected. A GTIN you buy directly from GS1 is registered to your business by name — it's the number, and the registration, that a marketplace or retail buyer is actually checking for.
If you already have a UPC
If you bought a GTIN or UPC prefix from GS1 before, you already have what you need — a GS1 Digital Link doesn't require a new or different number, just your existing GTIN written out in its full 14-digit form (padded with leading zeros if you started from a 12-digit UPC). See our GS1 Digital Link explainer for exactly how that padding works.
What we couldn't verify, and flagged rather than guessed
GS1's pricing, renewal terms, and prefix-capacity rules vary by country and change over time, and we've only confirmed the GS1 US figures above directly. We're deliberately not stating renewal fees, prefix sizes larger than the 10-pack, or non-US pricing here, because we don't have a verified source for them — check your GS1 member organization's own store for current numbers before you buy.
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