Trying out Barcodes for Small Business Dealers Den/Arist Alley

Another Anthrocon in the bag! Big success this weekend, gross earnings significantly increased over last year, I'm owing it to my reworked kickass display and addition of a few more high-priced items (desk mats, beanies).

I'm writing out my experience using barcodes with my convention setup, utilizing the Square iOS app for point of sale, and I'll write down what I learned in an attempt to help others get started.

Why Barcodes?

So, why bother with barcodes, you may ask? Sounds hard! You say. WELL my friend. Life isn't always easy is it! Sometimes you gotta put in effort to make things better or easier for yourself in the long run! It's totally doable!

Many fellow artists I've seen simply don't see the importance of keeping track of their inventory. Obviously, if you do, you can keep track of when you need to re-order merchandise, prevent overselling online, that kind of thing. But people often don't seem to take into account the other benefits, such as being able to see geographical trends of which items/themes sell best at which locations/conventions, and imo, most importantly, INVENTORY COSTS. Inventory costs you money. It costs an amount to produce, it takes up space. When you keep track of how much each piece of inventory costs per unit, and you have an accurate stock count, you can WRITE OFF an amount of unsold inventory you have at the end of the year on your federal taxes. I'm no tax expert but yall are just leaving money on the table!!! Maybe. I'm not certain, haha. 

Product barcodes simply speed up the process of inventory management, especially while making sales at a convention. Essentially, they are used to quickly input an exact product or variation of a product into your point of sale, or whatever other inventory management. A barcode isn't scary, it's literally just a bunch of bars that translate into numbers and/or letters that refer to the specific item when scanned. 

As someone who desires to make my inventory management more efficient, barcodes seemed like The Next Step for me.

Barcode Scanners

As a note, Square iOS app is only officially compatible with a couple of barcode scanners, the Socket Mobile S700 and S720. They connect via bluetooth, and according to Socket Mobile, the whole S700 series should be compatible with Square on iOS. The newest in the series is the S721, retailing for $200. These scanners aren't cheap, but you can find used scanners on ebay in the S700 series for under $100. 

Android users have a few more options. There are wired scanners on the list of barcode scanners compatible with Square. In addition, I think it's likely the Socket Mobile bluetooth S700 scanners will also work with android, but I can't confirm this, I'd have to suggest you look into it yourself as well.

But Jade! I don't have any money to invest in a scanner! You tell me. Well you, my friend, STILL have an option to scan barcodes, and that's the very camera on your phone that you're taking orders on! In the Square app, right next to the top search bar is the barcode scanning button! 

It will open up your phone camera when tapped, where you can easily just scan a barcode lickety-split, instantly adding the associated item to the cart. So why don't I recommend just doing this, then? One, it would require you and/or your phone to physically be at the table at all times to make sales, which presents a problem if you've got an assistant to take sales while you're gone. Two, at least in the period I was testing the phone camera barcode scanner (with my iphone 13 pro), the camera loved to scan any barcode visible in the entire camera screen instead of just the little central portion it shows. Big problem if you've got barcodes even remotely close to each other, it will gladly pick any of the barcodes it can see, making it kind of useless in my use case. I thought of a few different solutions for this, so it's not entirely out of the realm of usefulness, I just would rather use a separate device. Three, it probably drains your battery faster than not using it, which is a problem for my old ass phone that can barely keep a charge as it is, stuck at a table all day with no guarantee of having power to charge with.

Now, what if you don't want to get an expensive barcode scanner if you're not even sure you want to use it?? Don't even worry, we can actually use a generic, much cheaper bluetooth barcode scanner with Square, it's just a little bit more effort while you're making sales. While the Socket Mobile scanners/your phone camera will immediately add the associated item to your cart, a generic scanner that has an HID bluetooth mode (very common) will be able to be used to insert the barcode number into your search bar, immediately bringing up the item for you to add to the cart. It's a slower process for sure, but completely doable. This is what I did at this last convention, for the entire thing!

Scanning with a Generic Barcode Scanner

I picked up a secondhand Netum C750 for about $25, but any HID bluetooth scanner that scans 1D codes will do (2D is for like, QR codes and stuff). It simply pairs with your phone or tablet and acts as a keyboard input.

To use this in Square, you'll have to tap the search bar, then you scan with your scanner. It will quickly add the barcode number to the search bar, immediately pulling up the associated item/variant, then you just tap it to add it to the cart. To add an additional item, you'll need to hit the "X" to clear the search bar, and tap the bar again to restart the process. After that, the customer can be checked out as usual. 

It does add some time to the checkout process, versus instantly adding the item to the cart via "official" means. With multiple items, scanning every item and turning back to your tablet/phone to tap every time adds a couple seconds, but overall, the slowdown is well within a customer's tolerance for checkout time. Occasionally, you may get a bad scan, an incorrect number input due to angle or condition of the barcode label. I found that re-scanning a barcode more carefully would result in the correct input.

It definitely speeds up some aspects of the checkout as well, such as me taking forever to search for the item category I'm looking for. Formerly, I'd just have listings on square for "regular pin", "big pin", "keychain", etc. These were often nested in categories, and honestly, when inputting the item into square, I'll admit that my brain lags a bit in my effort to give the customer a speedy checkout experience, it often takes me a good number of seconds per item to read the entire page and find what I'm looking for, no matter how many times I've picked the same item that very day! Scanning the barcode completely removes this mental blockage I tend to face, since it instantly pulls up the item, requiring no extra brainpower on my part. 

How do I MAKE a Barcode?

How is a barcode created? Essentially, you will assign your item a string of numbers. They don't have to be anything specific, just make sure you don't duplicate a number on accident. It's like an SKU number. 

For use in Square, a barcode must be 8, 12, 13, or 14 digits long, with numbers only, no letters. This number will be input into the "GTIN" field in the item page in Square. It's ready to use at this point! Example:

To generate your literal barcode, you'll take this number into a program, or a website, or if you pay for Square premium such and such, you can print barcodes directly from Square.

Personally, for use with a Shopify integration, I used a free Shopify app, RF Barcode. It allows you to generate numbers and barcodes for all of your items free! By far the most convenient way for my setup. This app allows you to custom format your labels and print out whichever items you want to.

There are free websites that exist that will very easily give you a barcode based on a number. I'll suggest to you this site, that will generate a random number for you in addition to the bar code. Example using this website:

Overall, the process was not too painful for me. I've got about 150 products in my store, not including variants. Over a couple of days, with shopify I was able to generate my bar codes and figure out the program to print them all. I imported all of my relevant shopify products to square, with a paid third party program that keeps the inventory amount synced. It worked great for this con! 

I'll continue looking for the best way to make all this work. Lemme know if you've got any questions or need any help or anything.