Barcode label maker

What this tool does

Plenty of what a small shop sells has no barcode of its own: loose rice and sugar packed by the shop, stationery bought by the dozen, clothes, hardware, items from small local makers. Without a code, every one of those has to be found by name at the counter. This tool prints labels for them. Each label carries the product name, the price if you want it, and a Code 128 barcode that ordinary USB, Bluetooth and phone-camera scanners can read.

The barcodes are drawn by this page itself, in your browser. There is no sign-up, no upload and no limit beyond a couple of thousand labels at a time.

How to use it

1. Write one product per line: the name, the price, the code, and optionally how many copies. For example Sugar 500 g, 85, 100245, 10 prints ten labels. You can also paste three or four columns straight from a spreadsheet.
2. Pick the sticker sheet that matches your packet. The size is printed on the box, usually as the number across and down and the label size in millimetres.
3. If you are using a sheet that already has some labels peeled off, enter how many to skip, and printing starts after them.
4. Press Print labels. In the print window, set the scale to 100% (sometimes called "Actual size") and turn off headers and footers. "Fit to page" shrinks everything and the labels will not line up.

Print the first sheet on plain paper and hold it against a sticker sheet up to the light. If everything sits a little high or to one side, use the nudge fields to move the whole layout by a millimetre or two, then print on the real sheet.

Choosing your codes

Code 128 can hold English letters, digits, spaces and common symbols, so you are free to choose a system that makes sense to you. A few rules keep it trouble-free:

• One code, one product. Never give two different products the same code, and never reuse a manufacturer's barcode for something else.
• Keep codes short. Every character adds bars. On small labels, a long code makes the bars so thin that a scanner struggles. The tool warns you when that happens.
• Digits pack tighter. Runs of digits are encoded two at a time, so 100245 takes less room than SUGAR-HALF.
• Use a simple pattern, such as a category letter and a number (R001 for rice, S001 for stationery), so that you can tell what a code is without scanning it.

Worked example

A shop packs its own sugar into 500 g and 1 kg bags and wants 24 labels for the small bags and 18 for the large. The list is two lines: Sugar 500 g, 85, 100245, 24 and Sugar 1 kg, 165, 100246, 18. On a 3 × 8 sheet that fills the first page and 18 labels of the second, leaving the bottom two rows blank. Next week the shop puts that part-used sheet back in the printer, enters 18 in "Skip labels already used" for a new item, and fills the last six labels instead of wasting them.

Printing tips for small shops

Laser printers give the sharpest bars. Inkjet works, but let the sheet dry before peeling, and choose the larger label sizes if the bars look fuzzy. Put labels on a flat part of the pack, away from folds and seams, and avoid covering the label with shiny tape, which can reflect the scanner's light. When the price changes, print new labels instead of writing on old ones, so the shelf, the label and the till all agree.

Scanning a label only helps if the code is also saved against the product in whatever you bill with, whether that is a till program, an app or a printed price list. Add the codes there at the same time as you print.

Questions

Related reading

• Barcode scanning for a small shop: what to scan, what to skip
• Products, stock counts and knowing what to reorder
• How to manage inventory in a small shop without spending your evenings counting

Saleva does this automatically from your product list: it prints label sheets with Code 128 barcodes, and its till reads them with the phone camera. Get the free Android app.