Using Barcodes in the Retail Industry

Barcodes have redefined the system of tracking sales and inventory of merchandise sold at retail and wholesale outlets. Barcodes give a unique identification to every product and every piece, which when scanned with a bar code scanner or mobile computer provides all the details like price, weight and other specific details. This when fed into a computer systems helps to keep track of total sales, the inventory list and so on. Barcodes thus encompass processes needed to track inventory, document management and asset tracking. The age-old system of manual entries by specially employed staff to account for every piece sold, the stock of other products was not only time consuming but also left tremendous scope for errors and discrepancies which then needed to be checked and rechecked. Barcodes have helped get rid of all theses processes and procedures and the data scanned at the point of sale, eventually makes its way to the other related divisions and automatic checking takes place through the software used for barcodes.

Barcodes for specific uses use special symbologies. For instance the Universal Product Code or UPC is used for retail products, ISBN barcodes for books, ISSN for periodicals and so on.

To the layman, it seems to be a technological marvel to think how the set of parallel black lines contain so much information about the product they identify. However, the barcode itself just holds the manufacturer’s membership number, the identifier number of the product and a check digit that is generated by a formula for calculation to ensure that the data has been carefully and correctly scanned. These then are the components of the UPC barcodes. UPC barcodes have now become part of a global standard and the identification number generated is called the GTIN number. Each time the barcode is scanned, it is the GTIN number that gets scanned. This number is then searched in the database of the store, and it is from here that specifics like price, description, name, size and so on become available. This is used for printing the invoice for the customer.

Barcodes provide accuracy, help save costs and time spent, reduce errors and at the same time help the retail product become part of the globally acceptable system of identification. For retail purposes generally numeric barcodes are used though the alphanumeric ones can also be used. Linear or 2D barcodes, each would have to be generated used specific symbologies. These can be printed by using a barcode printer that will print the barcode on self-adhesive labels that can be stuck directly on the product. The most common and well repected printers are manufactured Zebra Printer range. However, for products to be universally acceptable barcodes have to meet the requisite standards and or else scanning them may not be easy. This can be tracked by the barcode verifiers often installed with the computer system in use.