Every UPC traces back to a GS1 company prefix, and AIMS360 assigns one to every style, color and size you sell. The same number reaches the retailer catalog through EDI 832, gets scanned in the warehouse, and carries an added serial number when a retailer requires RFID.
Every UPC on your product traces back to a GS1 company prefix licensed to your brand, and AIMS360 assigns one to every style, color and size you sell. That same number is what the retailer registry stores, what the warehouse scanner reads, and what an RFID tag carries once a serial number is attached to it. One identifier, created once, used by everything downstream.
A barcode identifies a product. An RFID tag identifies a unit. The UPC printed on a hangtag is the same twelve digit number on every single garment of that style in that color and that size. Scan it and you learn what the item is. An RFID tag carries that same number plus a serial number belonging to one garment and no other, so a read tells you which one.
The practical difference is counting. A barcode has to be presented to a scanner one item at a time, in line of sight. RFID reads by radio, so a rack, a carton or a whole sales floor can be counted in a single pass without anything being handled. That is the entire business case, and it is why retailers pushed the cost of tagging back onto their vendors.
Both live on the same product, and both come from the same place in your system. If the number in the ERP is wrong, the barcode is wrong, the tag is wrong, the retailer catalog is wrong and the advance ship notice is wrong. Everything on this page is really one argument for getting the identifier right once.
Not from your ERP, and not from a barcode generator website. From GS1.
A brand licenses a GS1 Company Prefix, and every product number it creates begins with that prefix. The prefix is what makes the number globally unique and traceable back to your company, and it is the reason a retailer, a marketplace or a customs authority will accept it. AIMS360 creates and manages the numbers; GS1 issues the prefix they are built on.
Put together, that is a GTIN 12, the twelve digit number a UPC A barcode carries. The rule that catches brands out is how many you need: one per sellable variant, not one per style. GS1's own worked example is a t shirt in three sizes and three colors, which is nine barcodes. Scale that to a real line sheet and a few hundred styles becomes tens of thousands of numbers, which is why UPC assignment has to work across the whole style, color and size matrix rather than one size at a time.
Prefix capacity comes in tiers, with an initial fee and an annual renewal, and GS1 US also sells individual GTINs for brands with a handful of products. Capacities and fees change, so check them with GS1 US rather than with us. What we can tell you is how many you are going to need, because that falls straight out of your size and color grid.
Different symbol, same identifier family. What changes is what is being identified and who is scanning it.
| Symbol | Carries | Identifies | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|---|
| UPC A | GTIN 12 | One sellable variant | The hangtag or price ticket on a single garment, and the number the register scans in a US store |
| EAN 13 | GTIN 13 | One sellable variant | The same job outside the US. Same number with a country or region digit in front |
| ITF 14 | GTIN 14 | A case or inner pack | Printed on the shipping carton for a fixed case pack, so the case can be scanned without opening it |
| GS1 128 | SSCC and other application identifiers | One physical carton | The shipping label the retailer scans at the dock, carrying the serial number your 856 ASN references |
| Code 128 | Internal references | Your own documents | Cut ticket travelers, WIP references, bin location labels. Never leaves your building |
The one worth understanding properly is the SSCC on the GS1 128 carton label. It is a serial number for the box itself, not for what is inside it. The retailer scans one label at receiving, looks up the ASN you already sent, and the entire carton contents are known without anything being opened. Get that number wrong and the carton becomes an exception at the dock, which is where compliance deductions come from.
Most department store programs will not issue a purchase order for an item that is not registered in a catalog they can pull from. The barcode on your hangtag is invisible to their buying system until the product data behind it has been published. For a large share of US department stores that registry is the OpenText GXS Active Catalogue, and the document that fills it is the EDI 832 price sales catalog.
AIMS360 generates the 832 and sends it directly, so nobody is exporting a spreadsheet and rekeying it into a web form. Change a price or add a colorway and the update goes out on its own. See how the GXS connection works.
Department store EDI identifies sizes and colors by National Retail Federation code, and the codes vary by customer class. Map them against the size scale once and every catalog submission and purchase order lines up afterwards.
Once the GTINs are registered, the retailer can send an EDI 850 against them. The order comes back into AIMS360 referencing the same numbers you published, which is why the line items match without a mapping exercise.
The 846 inventory advice reports availability against those same GTINs, so what a retailer sees as sellable is the number your warehouse just counted.
It is not a different numbering system. It is the same GTIN, made unique per unit.
Identifies the product. Every unit of that style, color and size shares it. A scan answers what is this.
An SGTIN, encoded as an EPC and written to the tag, commonly in the 96 bit SGTIN 96 format. A read answers which one is this.
Identifies the box itself, using the same serial shipping container code already on your GS1 128 label and already in your ASN.
That is the whole trick, and it is worth being concrete about it. Your GTIN 12 is padded to fourteen digits, the check digit comes off, the indicator digit moves, a serial number you control is appended, and the result is encoded into the tag as an EPC. The GTIN part is unchanged, so the tag and the printed barcode describe the same product. The serial is what makes one garment distinguishable from the identical garment hanging next to it. GS1 publishes the encoding standard.
Radio passes through cardboard and fabric, so a reader picks up tags inside a closed carton or across a rack. A store floor that took a night to count with barcodes takes an hour, which is why store level counts stopped being an annual event.
Encode the SSCC and the carton identifies itself. Receiving becomes a read at the door rather than a person opening boxes and scanning contents, and it reconciles straight back against the ASN you sent.
Because every unit has its own serial, a handheld reader can be pointed at a rack and told to find one specific garment. That is the feature store staff actually notice, and the reason retailers keep expanding the mandate.
Counts come back against the same style, color and size record that inventory, EDI, ecommerce and accounting all read. There is no second inventory to reconcile against the first one.
Brands get sold RFID as one product. It is three, and knowing which piece is which is what keeps the project from stalling.
The GTIN for every size, the style, color, size and description, the retail price, which items get tagged, and which are excluded from a floor scan. That data set is what tags are encoded from, and it is what the counts reconcile back against.
The tags or tickets themselves, the serial number allocation, and the encoding into EPC format. Ask any supplier for their data specification before you sign, and send it to us.
Handhelds, overhead readers and tunnels, plus whatever platform turns reads into counts. This is the layer that produces the floor scan.
Handheld scanning in AIMS360 Runway is barcode based. For RFID, AIMS360 is the product data source and the record the counts land against, not the reader. We would rather you know that before the project starts than after.
Apparel was first. Walmart began with apparel, then required tagging on home goods, sporting goods, electronics and toys by September 2022, and extended it to more than a dozen further categories by February 2024. Nordstrom, Dillards, Macys and Target run RFID programs across softlines as well, and the list has only gone one direction.
What none of that tells you is what you have to do. Categories in scope, tag placement, the encoding format, whether a tag goes on the ticket or the packaging, and what happens when an item is exempt are all set per retailer, in the vendor guide issued to you, and they change without much notice. Read yours, and if the data requirements in it do not obviously map onto what is in your system, that is the conversation to have with us early.
Everything else on the retailer side runs on the identifiers this page has been about. See the retailers AIMS360 connects to, or how GS1 128 labels and the 856 ASN are generated from the same pack that gets tagged.
A barcode identifies a product. An RFID tag identifies a unit. The UPC printed on a hangtag is the same number on every single one of that style in that color and size, so a scan tells you what the item is. An RFID tag carries that same number plus a serial number that belongs to one garment and no other, so a read tells you which one. That is why a barcode has to be presented to a scanner one at a time and a room full of RFID tags can be counted in a single pass.
From GS1. A brand licenses a GS1 Company Prefix, and every barcode number it creates starts with that prefix. The prefix is what makes the number globally unique and traceable back to your company, which is the reason retailers accept it. AIMS360 assigns the numbers across your style, color and size matrix, but the prefix has to come from GS1 in the first place.
One for every sellable variant, not one per style. GS1 uses a t shirt as the example: three sizes in three colors is nine barcodes, not one. That is why UPC assignment in an apparel system has to work across the whole size and color grid rather than at the style level, and why a brand with a few hundred styles can easily need tens of thousands of numbers.
GS1 US sells individual GTINs for brands with very small catalogs, and a company prefix in capacity tiers for everyone else. Which one makes sense depends on how many variants you sell now and expect to sell in two years. Check the current fees and capacities with GS1 US directly, because they change.
The GTIN is the number. The UPC is the barcode that carries it. A UPC A barcode holds a GTIN 12, twelve digits made up of your company prefix, an item reference you assign, and a check digit calculated from the other eleven. Outside the US the same job is done by EAN 13 carrying a GTIN 13. Cases and inner packs use a GTIN 14. All of them are the same identifier family in different lengths and different symbols.
It is arithmetic protection. The last digit of a GTIN is calculated from the digits before it, so a number that gets mis keyed or mis read almost always fails the calculation instead of quietly resolving to a different real product. It is the reason you should never hand type a GTIN into a spreadsheet and hope.
Not in practice. GS1 sets a waiting period before a GTIN can be reassigned, and for apparel it is long enough that reuse is rarely worth it. Reusing a number early breaks retailer catalogs, returns processing and sales history, because two different products end up sharing one identity.
Because the number sits under a company prefix licensed to somebody else. A resold barcode resolves to the reseller, not to you. Retailers and marketplaces that validate GTIN ownership against GS1 records will reject the item, and by then you have already printed the tickets.
Yes. AIMS360 assigns UPC numbers across the full style, color and size matrix rather than one size at a time, holds the number on the size record, and uses that same number everywhere downstream: the printed ticket, the warehouse scan, the retailer catalog, the packing list and the ASN. One number, generated once, used by everything.
The OpenText GXS Active Catalogue is a product data registry that a large share of US department stores pull from. For those programs, registering the item is what makes the retailer able to issue a purchase order against it, so a UPC that exists only on your hangtag is not enough. AIMS360 publishes to it with the EDI 832 price sales catalog, including NRF color and size codes, without anyone logging into a separate portal.
An SGTIN is your GTIN plus a serial number. It is what gets encoded into the EPC written onto an RFID tag, most commonly in the 96 bit SGTIN 96 format. The GTIN part is exactly the number in your UPC, so the tag and the barcode describe the same product; the serial is what makes each individual unit distinguishable from every other unit of the same size and color.
No, and no retailer program asks you to remove the barcode. The printed UPC stays on the ticket because point of sale, returns, e commerce receiving and every warehouse without RFID readers all depend on it. RFID is added on top, usually in the same ticket or label, for the jobs barcodes are bad at: counting a whole rack, finding one unit on a sales floor, receiving a carton without opening it.
Yes, and that is the main reason retailers pushed for it. Radio does not need line of sight, so a reader can pick up tags through a closed carton. Carton level identification uses an SSCC, the serial shipping container code that is already on your GS1 128 shipping label and already referenced in your 856 advance ship notice, so the tag is carrying a number the retailer is expecting either way.
AIMS360 is the product data source and the system of record, not the reader. Handheld scanning in AIMS360 Runway is barcode based. For RFID, AIMS360 supplies the identity data the tags are encoded from, including the GTIN for each size, the description and price, which items get tagged and which are excluded from a floor scan, and the counts come back against the same style, color and size record the rest of the ERP reads. Talk to us before you commit to a tagging platform, because the data handoff is the part that decides whether the project works.
Walmart started with apparel and has since extended tagging to home goods, sporting goods, electronics and toys by September 2022 and to more than a dozen further categories by February 2024. Nordstrom, Dillards, Macys and Target run RFID programs across softlines as well. The requirement that matters is the one in the vendor guide you were issued, because categories, placement and encoding rules differ by retailer and change without much notice.
Bring us your size and color grid and the vendor guide that is asking for tags. We will show you how UPCs get assigned across the matrix, how they reach the retailer catalog, and exactly what data an RFID program is going to want from you.
