Different Types of Barcodes and its Uses

‘Barcode’ is a word that is common to you since you could have seen barcode processing in majority of the purchases you have made. These are unique codes in the form of black and white bars that are given to the product for identification. You can see the barcodes evenly spaced and stores the product information in its binary form. The complete automated system includes a barcode reader, decoder and printer. The codes in the form of symbols, special characters or numbers can be decoded by any type of barcode scanner attached to the computer.

There are many different types of barcodes that are being implemented for many purposes, whereas the common purpose is for encoding a set of characters or symbols to form a code. Depending upon your business requirements, you need to choose the type of barcodes. In most of the cases the company that generates barcode solutions for your business decides the type of codes to be used whereas there are also companies that allows you to make your own choice. Listed below are the different types of barcodes used by business organizations.

Coupon Barcodes: This type of barcodes uses unique numbers for encoding data and is primarily used by companies to provide special offers in the form of coupons. Such codes encode more information than usual barcodes used in businesses.

Packaging barcodes: These are barcodes that are used in packing items to a distant place. Mostly whenever products are shipped to other destinations, these codes are printed in order to provide additional relevant information about the contents.

Retail Barcodes: These are the commonly used barcode type that is used in grocery stores and other retailer shops. Retail barcode systems are mainly designed for identifying products with categories and this has made data entry more accurate and faster.

Barcodes for publishing: Everyone might have seen barcodes printed on the back cover of books or magazines. These are called publishing barcodes, which mainly carries the ISBN number and price details in an encoded format. Book stores need this type of barcodes for selling any book or magazine.

Codes for pharmaceutical products: Medicine products are given barcodes with color variations in order to identify products with its pharma code and other specifications. Color varies accordingly and so is the number of bars used in the codes.

2D barcodes: The latest in technology and the most effective type is the two dimensional codes that are used in a wide variety of applications. This is the most reliable, easy to use and higher efficient type of barcodes and is now used in mobile apps for accessing client website and products. Businesses are experiencing an increase in the use of 2D codes because of its maximized encoding and faster processing.