Hello Again, Everyone.
I would like to request thoughts and feedback regarding how I can use/setup Products that have non-distinct barcodes. Iām only at the very beginning of my attempts to handle this situation, but Iām guessing Product Tags are going to be my best bet.
Hereās the situation.
In the beer world, some national grocery store retail chains require breweries to re-use the same barcode on their seasonal products if they are charging the same price for the product. Itās stupid, I know, but thatās just the way it is in the industry, unfortunately.
Now, I realize that I can simply create my own barcode for those products that are sharing barcodes, but thatās not a practical solution for our industry. We would have to create, print, and coverup every barcode thatās on every bottle or can of a pack of beer.
The problem is that when a beer needs to get returned, weād have to remove all the stickers from those products to get a credit. Sometimes those stickers will damage a product package/label and therefore our credit is negated. Not to mention that if we order multiple cases of a beer, now weāre having to printout 24 labelsāstandard case of beer is 24 units per caseāper case. We tried this before back in our early days and it was just not practical for our industry at all.
With that said, we need to get our to go items into the system as we donāt have them in there yet because of this āissueā. This has prevented us from completely moving away from our old school manual register which I need to get away from asap.
Other systems Iāve seen will pop-up a screen when you scan in a barcode that is assigned to multiple products, asking you to pick which product it is that you are trying to sell. Now, Iām sure there are very good reasons that you forced the barcodes to be unique, so I donāt want to ask anyone to āreinvent the wheelā here. I think it should be food for thought, though, for possibly a future release, as that will make SambaPOS more appealing to my industry (craft beer retail and taproom) which is growing very fast.
With all of that said, I would appreciate anyoneās thoughts and guidance on the possibilities, pros and cons, of using the product tag functionality to be a pseudo-replacement for barcodes for now. Or is there a better way to do this that does not include creating & printing unique barcode labels?
Thank you all in advance.
Cheers from Chicago.
Roy