SSCC

A pallet or carton on its way to a customer can carry a number of its own, like a licence plate: unique to that one pallet, never used for another. The customer's warehouse scans the label on arrival and knows what is on it without opening it, provided you told them in advance. That number, 18 digits long, is called an SSCC, short for serial shipping container code.

Where a GTIN says what a product is, an SSCC says which physical pallet this is. Two pallets of the same tea carry the same GTIN and different SSCCs. It usually appears as a barcode on the pallet label, in the GS1-128 format, and in the advance shipping message (DESADV) that lists what is on each pallet.

You create SSCCs yourself, from a company prefix, in sequence, and keep each one unique. Many retailers and wholesalers require them on every pallet they receive; ask your customer for their labelling rules before the first shipment.