What Barcodes Technology Can Do for Your Small Business
How do barcodes benefit small business retailers?
As consumers, we’ve seen thousands and hundreds of barcodes.
We’ve all seen them in stores, but we’ve probably never given much thought to what makes up a Barcode.
It’s critical to understand the fundamentals of small-business retailing. Barcodes are included in this.
What’s a Barcode?
A barcode is an image that is made up of white spaces and black bars. Other identifiers, such as numbers, letters and characters, can be found in barcodes. Each barcodes combination is a machine-readable representation of data. We’ll get to that later.
Barcodes were created to reduce human error. Barcoding is a great way to track inventory, transportation, product identification, organization and management.
A barcode is a universal and unique identifier.
Each product has a unique barcode. No two products will have the same barcode. Two 12-ounce Coca-Cola cans will always have the same barcode regardless of whether they are in a large grocery store in California or a small bodega in New York. However, 12-ounce Coca-Cola cans will have a different code than 12-ounce Diet Coca-Cola cans. These codes are universal, so you don’t need to update inventory even if you buy new products.
What Does a Barcode Do?
Your products will likely have a UPC (Universal Product Code) as a retailer. This code is the most commonly used product code in the US. It includes 12 digits left to right. This code can be broken down into different parts that identify the general or specific product category, manufacturer and product.
This code is pre-assigned so that when you order products from a vendor to your retail shop, they will have a set of barcodes printed or attached. This exception is only if you buy unique products made by small local businesses. These products may not be barcoded.
(UPC barcodes can be scanned at your point-of-sale with either a handheld 1D scanner or a stationary 1D scanner.
This scanner reads the barcode using a laser and sends the information to the point of sale in binary (0s and 1s).
When adding products to inventory, stock counting, or checking out customers, barcode information must be sent to the point of sale. The retailer would have to track and ring up the products, which makes inventory management almost impossible.
Barcodes and their benefits for retailers
Although it may seem like a nightmare to manage a small business without barcodes, we can all be confident that they won’t be going anywhere. Barcodes can be used for tracking manufacturers and products. However, they are also helpful for internal tracking.
If your small business sells custom or made-to-order products, you might consider using a barcode/label printer to create your point-of-sale system. This is a great way to simplify inventory management Software integrations are available that allow you to customize labels.
Conclusion
Contact to our SWIL team if you have questions about barcoding retail products or if you would like to know more about RetailGraph By SWIL India.
With RetailGraph’s barcoding feature, you can get details of anything you can put a barcode. You can track, scan into a computer system, and manipulate or report. When you’re ready to speed up your business processes, barcodes should be considered.