Multi-Billion Dollar Retailer Switched to Dynamsoft Barcode Reader SDK to Realize Consumer-Grade Barcode App Performance

The Customer

This customer of Dynamsoft is a leading retailer in the Oceania region of products for consumer and commercial customers in home renovation, building and styling. The retailer has hundreds of varied types of brick-and-mortar stores throughout the region. It is a multi-billion-dollar operation. It also has tens of thousands of employees. In addition to brick-and-mortar stores, the company also sells heavily online. This includes via popular desktop or mobile browsers and dedicated mobile apps.

The Need For Barcoding

The retailer needed a barcode scanning feature set for multiple mobile apps it provides to customers and employees. Initially, they wanted to add barcode scanning to just one app, which was a store app for consumers to shop online and offline, and for employees to help facilitate consumer shopping.

With this app, a consumer would either enter product information or scan a barcode to capture the product details. There would be a dedicated section within the app for barcode scanning. The type of barcode to scan would be common 1D barcodes used in retail.

1	Implement Fast 1D Barcode Scanning for Customer App This large retailer needed a new barcoding solution for their customer-facing shopping app. The app would also be used by employees. However, barcode scanning performance was important for a positive customer experience.
2	Replace the ZXing Library They Were Using to Speed Up Performance The development team attempted to implement the ZXing barcoding library, but performance was not up to their standard. Barcode scannability could never reach under five seconds on average – a deal-breaker for consumer-facing apps.

Upon scanning, the item would be automatically added to a customer’s shopping cart. They could then continue shopping, adding items to their app cart and physical cart, or could begin the checkout process and pay. Customers would be provided the option to pay at the register by presenting a QR code generated by the app. They could pay via the app and avoid register lines. An e-receipt would immediately be generated to present to a store representative at the store exit, completing their shopping experience.

The employee side of the app would have similar functions to the consumer side, in terms of being able to scan products for information about them and to facilitate purchases. However, the employee app also had functions to enable discounts and other promotional opportunities for customers.

Getting Going with a Solution

Like many developers, the team of 10 people at this retailer understood that building a barcoding solution from scratch was impractical. It could literally take months to a year or more simply to understand barcode technology standards and other related coding standards and then to develop the code for it.

So, the team began by using a free barcode library known as ZXing. They quickly found it was too low on performance that their app would require. This became more apparent once they also tried to span its use across dozens of other apps they supported.

Essentially, the speed of barcode recognition would take around five seconds or more. This is unacceptable for a consumer-facing app. As a result, the team went back to the drawing board to find a barcoding solution. They researched barcode software development kits and eventually settled on Dynamsoft Barcode Reader. The advantages gained were immediate and continue to be realized.

Advantages Gained

The development team was able to easily integrate Dynamsoft Barcode Reader. They immediately realized it delivered a lot better performance, accuracy and speed compared to ZXing. After weeks of use, so far it has worked really well and they have had no customer complaints or negative feedback related to scanning.

In addition, the retailer found Dynamsoft’s SDK pricing to be well within their budget. The pricing conveniently allowed an unlimited number of distributions and support for 1D and QR Code barcode types. As a result, the customer then purchased licensing to start use on a second app and they have indicated to Dynamsoft they have plans to spread the use of Dynamsoft Barcode SDK across even more apps.