We did it – we made 2,000,000 UPCs!
Let’s make it clear – quality is the goal on UPCZilla, not quantity. We could probably have dumped huge numbers of UPCs into our database a long time ago, but we prefer a slow and steady approach. There are technical issues to address, we need to make sure our server is not getting overloaded, and we also had a setback recently when we realised a bug had allowed a bunch of invalid UPCs to populate our database which meant our numbers were overinflated, and it caused big problems with Google as well. There were also quite a large number of UPCs that seemed to be formally valid but probably weren’t because they had 6 or 7 leading zeros which suggested they had just been generated randomly by retailers or manufacturers – we got rid of most of those, which also slowed down our growth.
However we got there in the end and we feel it’s a nice number for now. Having a couple of million UPCs now opens up the possibility to maybe do some new things like set up an API of some kind to allow people access our data in XML format – some people have already asked about that. Watch this space.
And of course we are not stopping there – as long as there are UPCs out there to be found, we will not rest! (well, we might have a little lie down sometimes) Next stop ten million!