iPad POS?

I guess I read too many collector car/barnfind sites -- I thought 'POS' meant something entirely different - and was a bit surprised to have someone call an iPad such.

that was my thought too. i thought they were going to ask for a product similar to ipad

I love going to the Apple store in Big America. They run your credit card on an iPhone and e-mail your sales receipt to your iPhone. 😎

I too thought POS was something else. 😉

A good friend of mine with a jewelry business here uses one of those card swipers from Paypal that plugs into an iPhone to sell purchases at the pier. It works quite well for her. She said when she signed up for the account they sent her the swiper.

ETA: I just realized you want to scan barcodes. No idea how to help you with that! 🙂

Thanks, everybody. I've been reminded of why I hate abbreviations and acronyms after posting this! For people who are familiar with retail, POS stands for Point Of Sale or cash register!

You can get a free scanner app on you iPad (it uses its camera) such as QRReader -- or a variety of AppStore barcode reading apps. If you scan the UPC (the barcode on any retail product), it will search the web for the price of that product.

If you need to look up against your own inventory and prices, it is a bit more complicated -- you need a custom app that reads from some sort of database stored in your iPad or another computer in your store.

If you create your own barcode labels then use the code 128 -- if it is too complex, you can buy cheap software that creates barcodes for you. Generally speaking the minimum size of the barcode that can be reliably scanned depends on:
- size of the label (your question, I think)
- the amount of data encoded
- the encoding technique (determines density) -- from code 128 to QR codes
- quality of print (shiny paper not good, laser printer crisper lines)

Probably too much information... sorry... tedious books have been written on the topic.

Thanks, Mickey, not too much info. I learn from each and every post so all info contributions are greatly appreciated!