What is special about EAN prefix 2 and 8-digit EAN codes?
07 April 2022The beauty of EAN codes is that they uniquely identify products and mean the same product in any store all over the world, well almost.
Sometimes stores want to sell products that don't have a barcode or they want to assign their own code for some reason. For that reason all 13-digit EAN codes that start with a 2 are reserved for such purposes. Since every store can assign them at will, you can't know what they might mean at another store.
The same is true for 8-digit EAN codes. They are also not globally unique and may mean different things in different stores.
That's why we don't include these barcodes in our database and you can't search for them, because the results won't make any sense.