How to Generate UPC Barcodes in Power Automate
Retail businesses in the United States and Canada need UPC barcodes to label their products for sale in North America.
That process starts with a GS1 registration — which gives businesses access to the unique barcode prefix they’ll need to generate their own UPC barcode numbers — and it ends with placing a physical, printed barcode label on the side of a physical product (or package).
Somewhere in the middle of that process, UPC barcode numbers need to be converted into scannable barcode labels, and the question for any small, growing retail business is how. Many barcode generator solutions require writing code or installing expensive applications, and that isn’t always viable in a pinch.
Thankfully, there’s one easy way to generate UPC barcode images from UPC barcode numbers without writing any code in the process. We can simply use the Cloudmersive Barcode connector in Power Automate, which can generate PNG barcode images for UPC-A (12-digit) and UPC-E (8–digit) barcode numbers.
In this article, we’ll run through a quick example flow that generates a barcode PNG image from an example UPC-E number. We’ll build a manually triggered, instant cloud flow in this case so we can have full control over data entering our flow in a quick test.
We’ll start by looking up the Cloudmersive Barcode connector in the Power Automate connector library.
To find Cloudmersive connectors, we’ll simply type “Cloudmersive” into the search bar. We’ll find the Cloudmersive Barcode connector first on this alphabetically arranged list.
We’ll then click “See more” to view the actions list, and from there, we’ll look for the Generate a UPC-A and Generate a UPC-E code barcode as PNG file actions. We’ll select whichever action is relevant to our product-labeling needs (in my example, I’ll be selecting the UPC-E option).
After we select our UPC barcode action, we’ll need to create our Cloudmersive connection in Power Automate. To do that, we’ll need a premium Power Automate license (Cloudmersive connectors are third party) and a free Cloudmersive API key. We can get the latter by creating a free account on the Cloudmersive website; it’ll give us the flexibility to make up to 800 API calls per month with zero additional commitments.
With our connection created and authorized, we’ll enter our UPC barcode number in the sole request parameter. In my example, I’m using a valid (and, of course, fake) 8-digit UPC-E barcode number.
This action generates our UPC barcode as a PNG file, and we can save that file in our system using a Create file action. We’ll need to remember to include the “.png” file extension in our file name.
When we save and test this flow, we’ll find a new barcode image in our target folder.
We can now add this PNG into digital documents related to our retail products, or we can convert the image to PDF so it’s optimized for printing. Easy!
