Mrs Blather is thinking of opening a shop where a considerable amount of merchandise does not come with bar codes. How much of a hassle is it to assign in-house bar codes, print them out, maintain the database, etc.? I like the idea of automatically updating the inventory as things are sold.
Another question: lets say you have blue, green, and red widgets and decide to put the red widgets on sale. Do you ordinarily assign different bar codes to different colors and/or sizes? (by this I mean a S vs L shirt, not 12 oz vs 32 oz bottle of shampoo).
I worked for about 2 years in a manufacturing environment (1988 to 1990) doing first inventory control, then administration of the computer system. I later worked for a large on-line retailer of toys for a year, doing the computer bits of inventory control. Some of my information might be a little dated.
Anyway, typically if they are different enough that customers would care, yep, they’d get different part/sku numbers. So different widgets would get different part numbers (WIDRED01, WIDBLU01, WIDGRN01), and different size T-Shirts would get different part numbers (TS-BARTMAN-W-L, TS-BARTMAN-W-M, TS-BARTMAN-W-S). I’m using Fully Significant Part Numbers, because I think it is clearer; I may be showing my age, since I think those are no longer used.
It really shouldn’t be that hard to get a bar code reader and a printer capable of making the labels. The database is frankly pretty trivial. Doing so, particularly for a low-margin, high volume store would be a good idea, and doing so from the beginning could help with the sorts of information gathering that tend to be important (what sells, what doesn’t, costs, etc).
Barcoding softtware is pretty cheap and easy to implement the software and scanner can normally be purchased togother. I even seem to recall some that work with common spreadsheets such as Excel (but don’t quote me on that one). As for printing them I use 2x4 labels on my products, but my software is capable of printing them in multiple sizes. I use 2x4 because my labels have to carry a lot of information, you may be able to go with just the barcode and a smaller label. The system I use has its own database, but I also keep another database in Excel, for inhouse reasons. My program was about $400.
All products should have a unique code. My suggestion would be to use the whatever your sources reorder number as the barcode number. After all, all the barcode is a visual representaion of numbers or letters made into thin and thick lines. In your example you buy your widgets from ACME widgets. The reorder numbers would be say 123blu, 123gre and 123red. Use those exact number and each code is unique. Then simply go into the system and change the price for that particular widget.
Depends. You can tie you system to increase or decrease automtically. Yu can tie it to the registers like stores. You need to be more specific.