Guides / 1 September 2026

GTIN must be 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits

Square stops the import and points at the GTIN column. The rule behind the message is short. A GTIN cell must hold 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits, and it may hold nothing except the numbers 0 to 9. Eleven digits fail. Twelve digits with a dash in the middle fail. A blank cell is fine, because Square never requires a barcode.

Why a barcode that scans fine still fails

The code is almost never wrong on the product. It is wrong in the file, and there are four usual causes.

• A leading zero was dropped. A spreadsheet read the column as a number, so 012345678905 became 12345678905 and now counts as eleven digits.
• The value turned into scientific notation, such as 7.48E+11. The digits after the fourth are gone from the file, not hidden.
• The supplier formatted the code for people, with dashes or spaces between the parts. Square counts those characters and refuses the cell.
• The column holds an internal reference rather than a barcode, so the length is whatever the supplier felt like.

Check the column before you upload

Drop the supplier file below. Every GTIN is measured, and the results are grouped by what is wrong rather than listed row by row, so a file of nine hundred good codes and four bad ones shows you the four.

Repair each case

Eleven digits is the common one and it is safe to repair. A UPC-A code is twelve digits and the last one is a check digit calculated from the first eleven. Pad the value back to twelve with a leading zero, recalculate, and compare. If the check digit still matches, the zero was the only thing missing.

supplier cell   12345678905
padded to 12    012345678905
check digit     recalculated from 01234567890 -> 5
result          matches, so the padding was right

Dashes and spaces are safe to strip, because they were never part of the number. Scientific notation is the case with no repair. The file no longer holds the digits, so the only fix is a fresh copy of the price list, opened as text rather than double clicked into a spreadsheet.

What happens if you upload anyway

Square treats a wrong GTIN length as a simple error and offers to resolve it for you. You then approve or decline that correction for the whole file, without seeing which rows it touches. Larger problems come back as a downloadable error report, and the failed rows stay out of your catalog until you correct the original file and import it again. Checking first turns that into a decision you make per group, with the row numbers in front of you.