Managing Thousands of Products With Barcodes in Hardware and Stationery Stores

1What Gets Harder With a Wide Range?

A hardware or stationery store carries dozens of sizes and colors of the same product: screws of different lengths, pens with different tips, paper of different weights. The products look alike, the prices are close and most products don't have a price on them.

With that many products, three jobs get harder: finding the right product quickly at the till, showing the price to the customer and keeping the product catalog in order. The steps below follow these three jobs.

2Sort the Range Into Categories

Categories organize the product list and the sales screen. Start with broad categories such as Hardware, Stationery, Paint and Electrical; when a category grows to hundreds of products, split it. In PratikKasa you create the categories yourself; there's no preset list. You can give each category a color, and the category chips on the sales screen take you quickly to the product you want.

Instead of entering products one by one, you can bulk import them from a CSV file in the Windows app. Download the blank template and fill it in; if a stock code (SKU) in the file already exists in PratikKasa, that product is updated, otherwise a new product is added.

3Sell With Barcodes at the Till

When you scan a barcoded product, its name and price go into the cart, and the risk of mixing up two similar products disappears. You scan with a barcode scanner on Windows and with the camera on Android phones and iPhone.

• No scanner? Type the code in the Scan Barcode window and add it.
• A barcode that isn't registered. If the code doesn't belong to any product, PratikKasa tells you; if you can manage products, you add the code as a new product or link it to an existing one. That way your product catalog is completed while you sell.
• A product without a barcode. Give loose items or products without a barcode a code of your own and print a barcode label for them from PratikKasa.

4Take the Price to the Shelf With a Label

If the shelf shows no price, the customer asks, and the price comes up again at the till. PratikKasa prints product and shelf labels on a thermal label printer. In the settings you choose which of these the label shows: product name, price, barcode, stock code and expiry date.

When a price changes, print the label again so the price at the till and on the shelf stay the same. On a phone you can select several products in the Products and Stock list and print their labels together.

The drawings in this post are based on the screens of PratikKasa 2.1.0.