Role of Barcode in OpenCart Point of Sale System

Using the OpenCart Point of Sale system a merchant can create orders for the products purchased by the customer from the physical store.

The OpenCart Point Of Sale system facilitates hassle-free transactions and the customer can place orders either from the physical store as well as from the online store.

What is a Point of Sale System?

Let us take any grocery store’s example, for instance, Walmart. A customer visits a Walmart store, purchases products and proceeds to a billing counter.

The cashier scans the barcodes of the products, and the details of the products instantly display on a POS machine. The merchant then tabulates the bill and provides the same to the customer.

The POS (Point of Sale) has eased things for a merchant in a way that it has reduced the labour of jotting down each product along with its price on a register and tabulating it.

This can be a tedious task as noting down details of each product for a long list of products is nearly a waste of time and until then the customer’s queue may increase and some customers may leave due to waiting in the queue.

What are the Barcodes?

While buying any product we must have encountered parallel lines separated by spaces, printed on the product.

These are machine-readable codes that the sales agent scans to retrieve the details of the product.

A barcode consists of five parts- a quiet zone, a start character, data characters, a stop character and another quiet zone.

• The quiet zones- They ensure that any data which does not relate to the barcode is being picked or scanned.
• Start/Stop Character- Indicates the start and end of the data. They are different for different Barcodes.
• Data Characters- The bars of the barcode which represent the data. A check character follows the data character which is a numeric value for the calculated error.

Importance of the Barcodes

Using barcodes the user can easily track the product inventory and get information about the products. The labour of entering the data manually minimize and it saves a lot of time.

1. It eliminates the risk of error that is caused while entering the data manually. The data scanning through barcodes is comparably fast and takes less time.
2. A merchant can easily handle and scan the barcodes for products using a barcode scanner, which increases the efficiency of the merchant.
3. The barcodes help track the inventory of the products precisely. The location of the product can be tracked easily, no extra time is wasted in searching for it manually.
4. Barcodes are easily created and the cost of creating them is also less. They are easily customizable.
5. When the agent scans the barcode, the product data is directly fed into the computer. Therefore the data is available instantaneously unlike in manual data entry where you have to scan the whole register to find the details.
6. The details of the product are accurate and reliable. The sales agent may fill in erroneous data while entering the details of the products.

Facility of Barcode through OpenCart POS System

Apart from easing things for the merchant in terms of better and more reliable transactions.

There are two key features that is relate to POS System developed in OpenCart - Responsiveness and Time Saver.

Responsiveness: It is necessary for any application to be responsive in nature. It is a plus point for your application to run on multiple devices.

OpenCart service for POS works with different devices which exhibits its responsive nature.

Barcodes also fix the issue of abandoned shopping carts through the responsive checkout process.

A responsive checkout process ensures that the customer does not leave the cart without processing the order.

Time saver: “Time is Money” and we all are aware of it. Barcodes help save time. The agent can process a long queue of customers in a short span of time. It enhances the efficiency of the sales agent.

How to Use Barcode in OpenCart Point of Sale

In the OpenCart Point of Sale System, the admin can set the barcode configurations as shown in the image below.

The admin can choose either to print the barcode or if necessary, regenerate the barcode for a particular product.

Using a barcode reader, which is an electronic input device using which the sales agent scans the barcode present on the product.

The POS user will scan the barcode and the barcode data will automatically be visible in the “scan the barcode” pop-up tab.

All the details of the product will be available on the POS machine. The POS agent can process a number of customers in comparably less time.

This increases the efficiency of the sales agent and no there is no manual labour.

That’s all for the Role of the Barcode in OpenCart Point of Sale. Learn more about Webkul OpenCart API development and OpenCart theme development.

Originally published at https://webkul.com on October 20, 2022.