GTIN must be 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits
Square rejects barcodes that scan fine in your shop. Why that happens, and how to repair the whole column before your next import.
Your import stops and Square points at the GTIN column. Each GTIN cell needs 8, 12, 13 or 14 digits and nothing else. An eleven digit code fails. So does a twelve digit code with a dash in the middle. You can leave the cell blank, since Square never requires a barcode.
Why a good barcode fails
The barcode printed on the product is almost always right. Something changed it on the way into the file, and it is usually one of these.
- A spreadsheet read the column as numbers and dropped the leading zero. 012345678905 became 12345678905, which is eleven digits.
- Excel turned the code into scientific notation, its short form for big numbers, so 748123456789 became 7.48E+11. Only the first three digits are left in the file.
- The supplier added dashes or spaces to make the code easier to read. Square counts those as characters and rejects the cell.
- The column holds the supplier's own reference number instead of a barcode, so it can be any length.
Find the bad rows
The Square tool measures every GTIN in the file and groups the problems by type. If 900 codes are fine and 4 are wrong, those 4 are what you see.
Open the Square tool to try it with your own file.
Fix each kind of problem
Eleven digits is the one you'll see most, and you can usually fix it. A UPC-A code has twelve digits. The last one is a check digit worked out from the first eleven. Put the zero back at the front, work out the check digit again and compare it with the last digit. If they match, the missing zero was the whole problem.
| supplier cell | 12345678905 |
|---|---|
| with the zero added | 012345678905 |
| check digit | worked out from 01234567890 as 5 |
| result | matches the last digit, so the zero belongs there |
You can delete dashes and spaces without worry. They were never part of the number. Scientific notation has no repair, because the digits are no longer in the file. Ask the supplier for a fresh copy of the price list and open it as text. Double clicking it into a spreadsheet will break the codes again.
If you import without checking
Square treats a wrong GTIN length as a simple error and offers to fix it for you. You accept or decline that fix for the whole file at once, and you never see which rows it changes. Bigger problems come back in an error report you can download. Those rows stay out of your catalog until you fix the original file and import it again. When you check first, you decide group by group, with the row numbers in front of you.