While barcodes are a central part of our infrastructure, so that we can relate products across data sources and supermarkets, there are cases when we want to include products that don't have a barcode. As an intermediate solution, we're giving certain products without an EAN an effective dummy EAN.
Barcode prefix 9669 is used as a Questionmark-specific barcode. It is a GS1 Global Office prefix, and until now not found on supermarkets products, and not likely to be in the future. Note that these barcodes should not be communicated outside Questionmark, since they are merely a tool to reduce complexity in Questionmark's systems. It is not GS1-compliant.
These are the current use-cases for dummy barcodes:
- Store-brand products only sold at one retailer without a barcode
- Products without a barcode for specific retailers that we want to process but don't expose publicly in the Questionmark API. This is a private dummy EAN.
- Multiproducts / product variants: some retailers give the same barcode to differents variants of the same product. We want to have them as separate entities. That's why we create a dummy barcode of the format
966999rrrbbbbbbbxxc, which allows multiproduct barcodes of up to eight digits (incl. check digit) and ten product variants.
There are the following formats:
9669bbbbbbbbc- old-style public dummy EAN13, used for store-brand products only.96690bbbbbbbbbbbbbc- public dummy EAN19: products are visible for all, EANs not.96691bbbbbbbbbbbbbc- private dummy EAN19: products are not visible outside of Questionmark.966999rrrbbbbbbbxxc- public dummy EAN19 for multiproducts / product variants.
We've encountered multiproduct dummy EANs longer than length 19 as well.