Barcode hardware/software gurus
Discussion
Are there any barcode hardware/software experts in the house?
Heres the situation, my wife is a full time eBayer selling clothing and sporting goods. She currently keeps a spreadsheet of stock and has to manually add new stock and remove items as they sell. Its all very time consuming and prone to human errors. As an example she has 5 pallets of trainers arriving this week (approx. 800 pairs), thats going to take some time to inventory and log!
It would be great to be able to scan the items as they come in to update the stock and then scan them as they are sold to reduce the stock level and also verify the item is correct.
Most of the items are ex-catalogue stock and so have either the manufacturer barcode, the catalogue company barcode or both.
What is in the barcode? Is it a unique manufacturer ID, is it a description etc?
I'm not even sure where to start with this, does the above sound feasible? What are the costs for the hardware, she may want a 'wireless' scanner as the stock isn't located near a PC at the moment.
Any help or ideas appreciated!
Rob
Heres the situation, my wife is a full time eBayer selling clothing and sporting goods. She currently keeps a spreadsheet of stock and has to manually add new stock and remove items as they sell. Its all very time consuming and prone to human errors. As an example she has 5 pallets of trainers arriving this week (approx. 800 pairs), thats going to take some time to inventory and log!
It would be great to be able to scan the items as they come in to update the stock and then scan them as they are sold to reduce the stock level and also verify the item is correct.
Most of the items are ex-catalogue stock and so have either the manufacturer barcode, the catalogue company barcode or both.
What is in the barcode? Is it a unique manufacturer ID, is it a description etc?
I'm not even sure where to start with this, does the above sound feasible? What are the costs for the hardware, she may want a 'wireless' scanner as the stock isn't located near a PC at the moment.
Any help or ideas appreciated!
Rob
If they're just straightforward barcodes (i.e. a sequence of varying width lines) then they'll just be an alphanumeric identifier.
That identifier has to be used in context, so potentially may be next to useless to you unless all your stock comes from one supplier.
In order to automate the process, you'd have to first have a computerised stock control system of some kind that lists all of your products with a unique identifier. It may be through fluke that you could use the manufacturer's own ids from their barcodes if they don't clash with ids from other manufacturers.
You'd then need hardware to read barcodes and software to facilitate reading the codes via the scanner and updating the database.
You'll notice that a lot of on-line companies that re-sell bits & pieces get around the "uniqueness" problem by having their own stock labels on the boxes they ship out.
You can buy software to print barcodes of your own making and hardware to read them, but this still means that you will have to manually tag each incoming item with the appropriate code.
>> Edited by pdV6 on Tuesday 14th June 12:57
That identifier has to be used in context, so potentially may be next to useless to you unless all your stock comes from one supplier.
In order to automate the process, you'd have to first have a computerised stock control system of some kind that lists all of your products with a unique identifier. It may be through fluke that you could use the manufacturer's own ids from their barcodes if they don't clash with ids from other manufacturers.
You'd then need hardware to read barcodes and software to facilitate reading the codes via the scanner and updating the database.
You'll notice that a lot of on-line companies that re-sell bits & pieces get around the "uniqueness" problem by having their own stock labels on the boxes they ship out.
You can buy software to print barcodes of your own making and hardware to read them, but this still means that you will have to manually tag each incoming item with the appropriate code.
>> Edited by pdV6 on Tuesday 14th June 12:57
A lot of goods designed for general sale will have an EAN or product barcode, which will be unique to the item. This is how supermarkets etc track their stock. I'm not sure if items like trainers will be the same, but it's worth a look.
You can buy a handheld scanner from the likes of Maplin for £50 or so which will plug directly into your PC keyboard socket (USB ones are also avaialble).
You can buy a handheld scanner from the likes of Maplin for £50 or so which will plug directly into your PC keyboard socket (USB ones are also avaialble).
rdhawkins said:
Thanks for the info, I thought printing our own would be the only reliable way of doing it.
The physical printing & scanning is easy; the "difficult" bit is computerising your stock and giving it a front end suitable for reading the barcodes.
FYI the scanner will simply spit out the text that the barcode represents, as if it were being typed on the keyboard. Therefore, its the front end of the stock control system that needs to be suitable to receive the IDs as they're typed/scanned and do something sensible with them.
If its a classic looking barcode (the lines) then if its got human readable format switched on (like cornflakes do) as Pete says the only thing encoded in the bar code is the number at the bottom.
This could be treated as a 'key' to a record in your stock control/listing system.
Theres almost certaintly a solution out there for inventory control but the barcode doesnt contain a product description as such.
Unless its a PDF barcode and thats something completely different... You can encode up to 1mb in one of them so they generally contain all sorts.
This could be treated as a 'key' to a record in your stock control/listing system.
Theres almost certaintly a solution out there for inventory control but the barcode doesnt contain a product description as such.
Unless its a PDF barcode and thats something completely different... You can encode up to 1mb in one of them so they generally contain all sorts.
Much fun it is playing with them, too!
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