EAN is designed by the International Article Numbering Association (EAN) in Europe. It is an extension to UPC-A to include the country information. The only difference between UPC-A and EAN-13 is that the number system in UPC-A is a single digit varying from 0 through 9, whereas an EAN-13 number system consists of two digits ranging form 00 to 99.

EAN-13 encodes 12 digits of numeric data along with a trailing check digit, for a total of 13 digits data.

An EAN-13 number consists of four elements: (1) the Number System; (2) the manufacturer code; (3) the product code; (4) the check digit. Normally the number system digit is printed to the left of the barcode, and the check digit to the right. The manufacturer and product codes are printed just below the barcode, separated by the guard bar.

EAN-8 is the short version of EAN-13, the same as UPC-E vs. UPC-A. While they look very similar, some differences exist. UPC-E does not explicitly encode the first digit (NS), while EAN-8 encodes all 8 digits. From barcode encoding/decoding perspective, an EAN-8 is not compatible with UPC-E. Moreover, although a UPC-E number can be converted back to UPC-A, this is not the case for EAN-8. There is no defined method for conversions between EAN-13 to EAN-8. An EAN-8 number is assigned in the same way as EAN-13.

An EAN-8 number contains 7 digits of message plus 1 check digit. The first two or three digits identify the numbering authority; the remaining 4 or 5 digits identify the product.