Every once in a while someone comes up with a tremendous idea to make money that conceptually is a good idea...if it worked, if there weren't free alternatives.
The folks who own the Barcode Registry at www.thebarcoderegistry.com/ have created the perfect "nothing-for-something" website. The "nothing" is what you get out of it, the something is $49.00 of your hard earned money.
They say... Welcome to the Official Registry of UPC, EAN, and SCC Bar Codes and their Associated Products. The Bar Code Registry is the world's largest and fastest growing centralized database of bar codes and their associated products. It is also the only membership subscription service designed specifically to protect your products from Bar Code Theft and Fraud.
Their claim to have a database of universal product codes amazed and intrugued me.
I wrote an article for the Nationwide Barcode website www.nationwidebarcode.com about why a Nationwide Database of Barcodes would be a great idea, and why it couldn't be used by retailers.
The article states:
The GS1 maintains a database of UPC Prefixes but, there are no formal centralized databases of product barcodes. Using the mathematical formula x=1110 there are potentially 100 billion products that can be represented by UPC-A barcodes at any given time. This, more than anything else, explains why there is no centralized database of products. Most retailers do not have the bandwidth, energy or resources to catalog something this massive. This is why, even the GS1 cannot manage a daunting task like this. If anyone can figure out how to manage a database this large, it will be Google...in fact, they are developing one that is free. (See below for info on Google's site)
Wanting to give "Barcode Registry" the benefit of the doubt, I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the jar of JIF Peanut Butter and a Box of Wheat Thins and entered in both UPC barcode numbers.
Nothing came up.
Barcode Registry claims to be an OFFICIAL site. This is a misleading statement as OFFICIAL leads people to believe that it is associated with the GS1 (The origination point for all UPC and EAN barcodes througout the world).
My guess is that the owner of a barcode subdivision company, Buy A Barcode, and his friends at Pinnacle Printing (John Rake, CEO, who provides a recommendation to use this site) needed an additional revenue stream, bought or partnered with the person who owned the domain and then created this site. My opinion is that this site is designed to rip-off the consumer and to give the owner of Buy-A-Barcode a (fake) story to tell. He now has "Endorsed by TheBarCodeRegsitry" on his website.
My recommendation is, do it for free...here are some great free sites where you can register your product and your barcode. The best one with the most search engine value is Google.
GOOGLE: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/products/submit.html
UPC Database: http://www.upcdatabase.com/ This one has been around for a long time
UPC Data http://upcdata.info/ Really hard to read, but cool.
BARCODEPEDIA http://en.barcodepedia.com/
