How to barcode products that came without one

Roughly half the stock in a lot of small shops has no barcode. Loose vegetables, screws from a bin, a reel of cable, anything handmade, anything repackaged, anything from a supplier who does not label. Meanwhile the branded tins scan in half a second and make the unlabelled things feel twice as slow as they are.

The fix is that you print your own. It is cheaper and much less technical than people expect, and the whole thing is an afternoon. But there are two or three decisions in it that are annoying to undo, so it is worth doing in the right order.

First, get the vocabulary straight

These two words get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing, and almost every barcode problem I have seen traces back to muddling them.

A code, or SKU, is your internal name for a product. You choose it. It goes in your system. OXF-BLU-M, ROPE-8MM, TOM-TIN-400. It never needs to be a number and it should be readable by a human, because you will be reading it in reports for years.

A barcode is a machine-readable rendering of a string of characters. That is all it is. A pattern of stripes that a scanner turns back into text and types out like a keyboard.

The useful consequence: a barcode does not have to contain a special retail number. It can contain your own code. The scanner reads ROPE-8MM, your till receives the characters ROPE-8MM, and it looks up the product. No registration, no authority, no fee. The EAN and UPC numbers on branded goods exist so that the same tin scans identically in ten thousand shops. Your rope is only ever sold in your shop, so it needs no global identity at all.

People pay for barcode numbers they do not need surprisingly often. If you are labelling your own stock for your own till, you need nothing from anyone.

When you do need a real EAN or UPC

Two cases, and only two.

You are selling wholesale into other retailers. They need a code that means your product in their system, and that means a real GS1-issued number. This costs money and involves an application, and if you need it you probably already know.

You are selling on a marketplace that requires one. Some do. Check before you build a catalogue on your own codes.

For everything sold across your own counter, skip it.

Decide what you are labelling

This is the decision people get wrong, and it costs the most to reverse.

Label the shelf or the bin, not the product, for anything loose, bulk or unpackaged. You cannot stick a label on a screw, and you should not try. Put the label on the bin, the shelf edge, or a laminated card in a ring binder at the till. The cashier scans the bin, then enters the quantity or the weight.

This is the single biggest speed improvement available to a shop with a lot of loose stock, and it costs about the price of a sheet of labels. A hardware shop with sixty bins can label all of them in an hour and cut a minute off every mixed basket.

Label the product where the product can hold a label and leaves the shop with it: repackaged goods, hampers, anything handmade, anything you have assembled yourself.

Do not label the branded tin that already has a barcode. It already works. Overlabelling existing barcodes is a real mistake shops make when they get enthusiastic, and it creates a shop where the same product scans differently depending on which one you pick up.

Choose your code scheme before you print anything

Ten minutes here saves a lot of pain, because reprinting sixty labels because the scheme was wrong is a bad afternoon.

Structure it. A prefix per category or range means search does useful work later. ROPE-8MM, ROPE-12MM, CHAIN-6MM. Typing ROPE gets you every rope. Typing 8MM gets you the eight millimetre things. That behaviour is free if your codes have structure and impossible if they are sequential numbers.

Keep it short. Under about twelve characters. Long strings make wide barcodes, and wide barcodes do not fit on small labels and scan less reliably.

Avoid ambiguous characters. No letter O next to digit zero, no letter I next to digit one. Somebody will eventually read one out over the phone or type it by hand.

Never reuse a retired code. When a product is discontinued, its code is spent. Reusing it welds two products’ sales history together and there is no clean way to separate them afterwards.

Uppercase, no spaces. Hyphens are fine. Spaces in a code cause trouble in exports, in imports and in some scanners.

Now the actual printing

Two routes, and the cheap one is fine for most shops.

The cheap route: a sheet of labels and any printer. Free barcode generators will produce a Code 128 image from any text you give it. Code 128 is the right format for your own alphanumeric codes: it handles letters, it is compact, and every retail scanner reads it. Lay the images out in a word processor or spreadsheet, on standard address label sheets, and print. Total cost is the sheet of labels.

Some POS systems will print barcode labels for you directly, which is nicer because the code is guaranteed to match what is in the system. Check whether yours does before you build a spreadsheet.

The proper route: a label printer. A small thermal label printer is worth buying once you are labelling regularly, especially for repackaged goods where each batch needs new labels with new weights. It is not an urgent purchase. Start with the label sheets.

Print one label first. Scan it. Then print the other fifty nine. This is the step everybody skips and it is the reason people occasionally have a sheet of sixty labels that all scan as the wrong thing.

The bit that goes wrong: quiet zone and size

If a barcode does not scan, it is almost always one of these three, in this order:

Not enough white space around it. Barcodes need a clear margin, called a quiet zone, at each end. Roughly the width of ten of the narrow bars. Crop it tight to save space and the scanner cannot find where the code starts. This is the single most common cause of an unreadable label.

Printed too small. Shrinking a barcode to fit a small label eventually makes the narrow bars thinner than the scanner can resolve. If it will not scan, print it 20 percent larger and try again.

Printed on something shiny. Gloss labels under a bright shop light reflect straight back into the scanner. Matte labels, always.

A fourth, less common: a nearly-empty inkjet cartridge produces bars with gaps that look fine to a human and are unreadable to a scanner.

Test with the thing you will actually use

Print your test label and scan it with the scanner that will be on the counter, at the angle a cashier will hold it, under the shop’s actual lighting. Not with your phone on a desk by a window.

If you do not have a scanner yet, you may not need one. Phone and tablet cameras read barcodes perfectly well in a browser now, which is slower than a proper scanner, roughly a second rather than instant, but genuinely fine for a stock take or for checking a price on the shop floor. There is more on what hardware you actually need in running a POS without buying any hardware.

The afternoon, in order

1. List the products with no barcode. Pick the fifty that turn over most. Ignore the rest for now.
2. Decide your code scheme. Write it on a card and put it in the stockroom.
3. Enter the codes into your system against the right products.
4. Generate Code 128 images for those codes.
5. Print one. Scan it. Fix the size or the margin if it fails.
6. Print the rest, stick them on bins and shelf edges rather than on products.
7. Ring up a mixed basket, some scanned branded goods and some scanned bin labels, and see how it feels.

Then leave the long tail alone until it annoys you. A shop where the fifty busiest loose lines scan is 90 percent of the benefit for 15 percent of the work, which is the same principle that makes a rolling stock take beat one annual count.

Where StoreWave sits

Every product in StoreWave has its own barcode field, separate from its code, so your own Code 128 labels and a supplier’s EAN both work and a product can be found by either. Search matches on name, code or barcode, and it matches anywhere in the string, so a structured scheme like ROPE-8MM lets you type ROPE to see the range or 8MM to see one gauge.

Scanning needs no setup. USB scanners are keyboard-wedge devices, so they just work, and the app tells a scanner’s burst of keystrokes apart from a person typing, which is what lets a scan drop straight into the basket while the search box still behaves like a search box. Where there is no scanner, the device camera reads EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A, UPC-E, Code 128, Code 39 and QR codes, on the till, in the inventory screens and at the return counter. So the phone in your pocket is a working scanner for a stock take today.

StoreWave does not print labels for you. You will generate the Code 128 images elsewhere and print them onto label sheets, which is the cheap route above and works fine, but it is a step we do not do for you.