Five barcode formats
UPC-A and UPC-E, EAN-13 and EAN-8, and Code 128. The first four cover ordinary retail packaging; Code 128 is what warehouse and pallet labels are printed in, so liquidation lots scan too.
Point a phone at the barcode and the search is already running
Typing a product name while holding the product is the slowest thing in live selling. The scanner exists so nobody has to. It opens in a phone browser, reads the barcode formats that retail boxes and warehouse pallets are actually printed with, and hands the digits straight to the same search everything else uses.
- Capabilities
- 10
- Where it runs
- On your helper's phone
It reads continuously, with no shutter button
The camera decodes about seven times a second and fires the moment it recognises something. Nobody has to line up a shot, hold still, or press anything. Point it and it lands.
No app to install
It uses the barcode decoder already built into the phone’s browser. Your helper opens a link and scans. There is nothing in an app store to find, download, or keep updated.
The back camera, not the selfie camera
It asks for the rear camera, because that is the one pointing at the box.
A flashlight when the phone has one
A torch toggle appears only if the camera actually supports it, and it disappears again if the phone refuses to turn it on. There is never a button that does nothing.
Type the number instead
For a barcode that is scuffed, curved, or shrink-wrapped past reading, there is a keyboard. The typed digits go to exactly the same place the scanned ones would.
Or send a photo instead
The other way out of a dead end. Both fallbacks sit on the screen that failed, not buried in a menu somewhere else.
It tells you when it cannot scan
On a browser that cannot decode, the scanner says so and offers the keyboard and the photo instead. It never spins forever pretending to look. A tool that fails invisibly during a live show is worse than one that does not exist.
A blocked camera is its own message
Permission denied and not supported are different problems, so they get different screens. One tells you to allow the camera; the other tells you this browser will never manage it.
A scan is just a search
Decoded digits run down the same identifier detection as anything typed. There is no separate barcode mode with its own worse results.