It is usually recommended to use a barcode system to help track and speed up your business. Most of the people have not made barcodes themselves, but they have seen them in retail stores. They take an item off the shelf, bring it up to the counter, the clerk scans it in and the computer screen is instantly populated with the name and price of that item. This common experience can cause the misconception that the barcode itself had all of that information embedded within it. However, 1D barcodes (a.k.a. one-dimensional or linear barcodes) are just a series of vertical lines in varying widths. These barcodes, which are common at most retailers around Europe and North America, do not store a lot of information about products. Barcodes are based on a simple idea. However, reading the number is not always easy. A person or machine could easily misread a number that has been damaged. If you accidentally damage or misprint a 6, it could easily become a 9. To overcome this problem, you can convert the number into a shape that a computer can read. In this case, a sequence of black and white lines. If you would like to know the technical aspects of creating a barcode, you can view more options by consulting with a professional barcode generator.
Popular use of Barcodes in online live casinos
Barcodes are applied to products as a means of quick identification. They are used in retail stores as part of the purchase process, in warehouses to track inventory, and on invoices to assist in accounting, among many other uses. The usage of barcodes has extended to many industries including online casinos. Barcode images are common to several sectors and are a widely used form of growing website traffic. Knowing how to produce images of barcodes can give a key advantage to your company. Casino owners of online casinos might distrust computers shuffling cards, but they are still highly dependent on technology, especially when it comes to tracking cards. As dealers use real cards, every live dealer uses some kind of technology to track, identify and convert cards into a digital format. One of the methods used is Barcode Scanning. Shops use the same technology to scan groceries. Bright Star Casino dealers take special cards with unique barcodes that have to be scanned, identified through its barcode and converted into a digital format. Once it is scanned, players can see real-time data on the screen. It is a very popular and widely used form of identification due to its simplicity and reliability.
Types of barcodes
The types of barcodes you will see are not all the same. The different barcodes will use different symbology. That symbology will determine the number of characters it can include, and what specific set of characters it can display. Codes like UPC-A or (12 digits) EAN-13 (13 digits) are often used in retail, and you will often see Code 128 (which can display all 128 ASCII characters) represent the tracking codes on packages. There are different types of barcodes namely:
1-D Barcodes
These are the typical barcodes that you see in your local store. They also appear on packages sent through postal services. They are even found on the rear of books next to the ISBN. They are composed of black and white lines. These lines will provide information such as item type, size, and colour.
2-D Barcodes
2D barcodes are more complex than 1D and can provide even more information. You may know them as QR codes. Standard barcode scanners are not used to read these codes. However, as you likely know, you can use a standard application on a mobile phone to access them.
How to read a barcode?
When a barcode is scanned, the string of vertical lines are interpreted by the computer and then output as text. The point-of-sale system can recognize that string of text and will know to bring up certain details like the name and price of that item as a result. That relationship between the barcode and that item had to be established beforehand. The barcodes were generated either by the business itself or in concert with an organization known as GS1, which licenses barcodes to companies all around the world.
Option 1: How to create barcodes by yourself
Making and printing your barcodes is not that hard to do. You will use the software on a computer to generate codes using an existing symbology like UPC-A or Code 39.
First, you will need barcode generation software, which can generate barcodes and also print them out for you. Or you can use a barcode font, like our handy dandy Archon Code 39 font, so that you can write your barcodes in a program like Microsoft Word. It is up to you how to break down the actual barcodes, but you will probably want to build in a hierarchy so that you can see, at a glance, what kind of product a barcode is for. The UPC-A symbology gives you 12 total digits, but only the first 11 digits contain message data. The 12th digit is called the “check digit” and functions as a way to verify the barcode has been read properly. If you are generating your codes manually, you can create a check digit with a bit of math. That is the most basic breakdown of a UPC-A barcode, but you can also do more advanced stuff by breaking down the other 11 digits into sub-categories.
Option 2: How to create barcodes with GS1
If your long-term plan is to sell your products in other stores (which use different point-of-sale systems), then you will want to ensure your barcodes are created and registered with GS1. This will not take as much personal know-how and software, but it is a greater financial investment. Let us take a look at the Universal Price Code (UPC) once more. A standard UPC-A barcode has 12 digits in total. When you register a barcode with GS1, there are different tiers you can purchase based on the prefix size. These tiers have differing company prefix lengths. The longer prefixes are cheaper, and smaller prefixes are more expensive.
Wrapping up
The choice between having your custom barcodes vs. registered barcodes boils down to the question whether you would like to sell your product at stores other than your own. Creating your custom codes can be done with your home computer, some software or font packs, a scanner, and a label printer. Once you have the right setup, the costs are about the same whether you choose to create 100 barcodes or 1000. This can be a great choice if you have got a smaller shop, or if you just need barcodes to help manage inventory. But if you want to enable other businesses (especially larger big box stores) to stock your product, you will need to go the registered route with GS1. Either way barcodes help provide asset & security tracking, theft deterrence, peace of mind, and a demonstrable reduction in loss/liability.