More Than Checking Prices — How to Get the Most Out of A Store UPC Barcode Scanner

Since last 2012, the BuyVia team has had insight into what features our users are interacting with the most.  It quickly became clear that in-store barcode scanners are very popular. These scanning capabilities have literally put the world in your hand by empowering you to quickly compare prices of products you’re searching for to guarantee that you’re truly getting the best deal.

Sometimes when you use a barcode scanner to scan a product, you may experience a scanning error.  We’ve discovered that a large number of UPC scanning errors stem from the various barcode formats available and proprietary products—some of which are specific to certain vendors.

With that in mind, we thought it would be helpful to create a handy UPC barcode scanner cheat sheet, to ensure you get the most out of your UPC scanning experience.

The Top 4 Things to Consider Before Using Your UPC Scanner:

1. UPC barcodes have 12 or 13 numeric digits, if the barcode you’re seeing has anything else, then it is not a UPC and will not produce a result when scanned. The EAN or European Article Number is a superset of the UPC, adding an extra digit, 13 in total.
2. A few vendors have custom barcodes to accompany their branded products. These retailers include Walmart, Costco, and Target, so if you try scanning one of these custom UPCs, it will show up as an error since these products are unavailable in other stores.
3. Some products are simply not available for price comparison because the vendors do not want them to be. The majority of these are grocery items.
4. When scanning products please do the follow: hold the smartphone still, ensure there is a good amount of light on the product, eliminate any lighting glare, position your phone straight in line with the product, and hide any other barcodes that are situated near the UPC barcode. Some of these extra barcodes contain suggested retail price and other information.

For more advice on how to best use your UPC scanner, check out the new BuyVia 1.1 features and how we optimized the scanning capabilities.

We hope these tips help you shop smarter and utilize all of the advantages to our UPC barcode scanner.  Feel free to send us any questions or suggestions you may have via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Don’t forget to download the BuyVia App and start shopping smart today!

--The BuyVia Team

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