Hidden gems: Prefix search in our API
08 April 2022When you have an account, you get access to our API, that allows you more flexible searching than the website. With the API, you can not only search for an EAN code and get the product or search for a name and get the EAN, you can also search for only the start (the "prefix") of the barcodes.
So let's say you have the imaginary EAN code 4567891234567 and you suspect the same manufacturer makes other interesting products. Since most large manufacturers register a large range of EAN codes at the same time, you could use the API call barcode-prefix-search and see if we have any other EAN codes that start with 4567891234xxx (using the prefix parameter) and more often than you think, you will find related products.
The API will return a list of all matches and if there are many, you can use the additional page parameter to page through all of them.
The API requires that you specify at least the first 4 digits, but that will yield a huge number of results, so better start with a much longer prefix, like in the example above.