Video




Preface


This video and article demonstrate how you can use your SKU as a barcode. There is a fairly common misconception that you must purchase registered UPC codes in order to barcode and scan items - but that's thankfully not true! Any arbitrary value can be used as a barcode. Since every item and variant in your product catalog already has a unique SKU, the SKU becomes a popular choice as an internal barcode value. Keep in mind though, registered barcodes are advisable if you'll be selling to retailers that require a registered barcode to prevent conflicts with other items. You can purchase registered barcodes from GS1 and reputable resellers.



Process for Generating Barcodes from the SKU



  1. Select one or more items from the list in the products section by clicking on their row. Alternatively, you can use a search to isolate a group of items and use the Select All option to create the selection.
  2. In the 'edit' drop-down choose 'generate barcode from sku'. If you would like to use a numeric barcode due to restrictions in another system we've now added the option to "generate a numeric barcode" to the same dropdown. 









Automatically Generating Barcodes from the SKU for new Products


The use of the SKU as a barcode is so common we've added a feature in GroovePacker to automatically generate SKU-based barcodes for any new items that are encountered during an order import. This can be enabled in the Store settings of the Import source. This is pretty ideal in some



Printing Barcodes


For details on the various methods you can use to print your product barcodes please see this article




Video Transcription

Let's take a quick look at how you can use your SKU as a barcode in GroovePacker. A lot of people think that you have to have a registered UPC code in order to scan items, but that's not true. Depending on the barcode format that you're using, any Alphanumeric character can be used, so it's no problem to copy your SKU and use it as a barcode. So when we do that, we just need to open up a product and select your SKU and save it as a barcode. But if you have several hundred products that you'd like to do this for, it's a lot more convenient to select the products like this and select Generate Barcode from SKU from the edit dropdown. And you can see that each of those then has the barcode matching SKU. So after you've generated barcodes from your SKU, the next step you might want to take is to print these so they can adhere to products for scanning. So whatever barcode you have here, you can print just by clicking the printer icon and a PDF will be generated that you can print on your thermal label printer. The label size is 1x3, which is a really convenient size for barcoding. And that's it, just stick those on the products and you're ready to scan. Thanks for watching, bye.