An EAN (European Article Number) is a standardized 13-digit barcode used globally to uniquely identify retail products. It is the international equivalent of the UPC (Universal Product Code) used in North America, and both are part of the broader GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) standard. When you scan a product at a retail checkout or see a barcode on packaging, that barcode is typically encoding either an EAN-13 or a UPC-A number.
EANs are assigned through GS1, the global supply chain standards organization. A business registers with GS1 to receive a GS1 Company Prefix, which is then combined with a product-specific identifier to create a unique EAN for each SKU. This uniqueness is the core value: every product from every manufacturer worldwide has a distinct EAN, enabling consistent product identification across retail systems, marketplaces, and supply chains without ambiguity.
For Shopify brands selling through multiple channels, EANs (and GTINs more broadly) are essential infrastructure. Amazon requires valid GTINs for most product listings, and listing without them either blocks the listing entirely or requires a GTIN exemption. Google Shopping uses GTINs to match products to Google's product catalog, which directly affects product listing ad quality scores and eligibility for enhanced product features like ratings and pricing comparisons. Without correct GTINs in your Google Merchant Center product feed, you may be excluded from Shopping results for your own products.
For inventory management, EANs work alongside SKUs to create a dual identification system. The SKU is internal - assigned by the merchant to track variants and fulfillment. The EAN is external - recognized by retailers, marketplaces, and logistics systems worldwide. Shopify supports EAN entry in the product details section and passes them through to connected sales channel integrations. Brands selling wholesale to retailers will also need to provide EANs on all products, as brick-and-mortar retail systems are entirely dependent on barcode scanning for inventory management and point-of-sale processing.
In practice, EAN data tends to drift between systems rather than being wrong from the start: a barcode entered correctly in Shopify can still fail Google or Amazon validation if the feed mapping that pushes it to each marketplace doesn’t handle formatting consistently, and brands running an ERP alongside Shopify often find EANs get out of sync between the two unless the inventory sync between systems treats barcode fields as part of the core data map rather than an afterthought.
EAN drift is really a symptom of a bigger multichannel problem — any identifier that has to stay consistent across Shopify, a marketplace, and an ERP will drift unless the systems syncing between them treat it as core data rather than an afterthought; this guide to Shopify multichannel selling covers how that sync is typically structured.
.png)
.png)
