How to Generate and Print Barcodes for Shopify & WooCommerce: A Complete Guide
Written by Tomasz Lichosik
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Most Shopify and WooCommerce stores start by tracking stock from memory and the layout of the shelf. That holds up right until it doesn't — and the day you ship a customer the wrong variant, you pay for it in a refund, a return, and a one-star review. A barcode system is what closes that gap, and setting one up is more straightforward than it sounds. Here is the whole workflow, from picking a format to printing the labels.
What barcodes actually fix
Before the how, the why, briefly:
- No more picking errors. Scan before packing and the right item goes in the right box, every time.
- Faster fulfilment. No hunting the shelf for "blue t-shirt, size M" — a scan tells the system exactly what was picked.
- Live stock. Each scan updates inventory in Shopify or WooCommerce in real time.
- A tidier impression. Clean, scannable labels read as more professional than a handwritten note.
Step 1: Pick the right format
The choice comes down to whether you make your products or resell them, and where you sell.
You make your own products and sell only on your own site. Handmade candles, custom apparel, local goods — you do not need official global numbers. Use Code 128: it is compact, scans reliably, and lets you use your existing SKUs directly as the value, like TSHIRT-BLU-MED.
You sell on Amazon, eBay, or into physical retail. Now you need standard retail codes — UPC-A in North America, EAN-13 globally — and to use them legitimately you buy an official GS1 company prefix so your numbers are unique worldwide.
Step 2: Store the number in your platform
Both platforms have a place for it.
Shopify: open a product, scroll to the Inventory section, and put your value in the Barcode (ISBN, UPC, GTIN, etc.) field — your SKU for Code 128, or your official UPC.
WooCommerce: core WooCommerce only tracks SKUs, so add a free plugin like "EAN for WooCommerce" or "WooCommerce Product Barcode," then enter the value in the new barcode field when editing a product.
Step 3: Generate the images
Your platform now knows the numbers; you still need the scannable images to print. For a store with dozens or hundreds of products, generate them in one pass rather than one at a time. On BarcodeReady, open the bulk export, paste your list of SKUs or UPCs straight from Shopify or WooCommerce, choose the format (usually Code 128), and generate a single print-ready PDF covering the whole catalogue.
Step 4: Print them properly
Skip plain office inkjet on standard paper — the ink bleeds and the codes stop scanning. The better setup is a dedicated thermal label printer (a Dymo LabelWriter, Rollo, or Zebra), which uses heat rather than ink, so labels do not smudge and hold up well. Print from the SVG or PDF output to keep the lines crisp; blurry PNGs are the usual culprit behind failures under warehouse lighting.
Step 5: Scan and fulfil
Last piece is a scanner. A simple USB or Bluetooth 1D laser scanner ($30–50) plugged into a laptop running your store dashboard covers most needs. Many owners also use the Shopify mobile app with a phone camera, though a Bluetooth scanner paired to the phone is noticeably faster at volume. When an order lands, staff pick the item, scan it, and the software confirms it matches the packing slip before it ships.
Moving from manual tracking to scanning is the single biggest step toward running e-commerce fulfilment like a real operation. Generate your store's codes in bulk on BarcodeReady and you can have the whole catalogue labelled in an afternoon.