> Did you not find the keyboard-style integration limiting regarding integration in your app
We didn't. We were able to use regular <input> fields and handle input in all the ways we already knew how to support well. It had the added benefit that manual testing during development could also be done with the keyboard which meant we didn't need to give engineers any specialised hardware most of the time.
The flexibility also helped when we ran certain processes in the warehouse in different ways. We (engineering) learnt a while after we had put the system into action that sometimes people in the warehouse weren't using a phone with an attached or built-in scanner, but were sometimes using a Chromebook with a scanning gun. They'd use this for various bulk processing, or supervisors would use this because they worked mostly in the non-mobile tools or needed the productivity of a bigger screen and laptop over a phone.
I guess the overall thing here though was that we just never thought about barcode scanning because it never came up as an issue[^1].
> I have some experience with Zebra TCx devices ... but they're quite expensive. Many companies...BYOD... Also some companies ... rely on external partners ... where you don't know what kind of device they'll use.
This is a fair point. We didn't BYOD because these devices were in constant use in a busy warehouse and personal phones wouldn't have cut it in terms of reliability, but for more occasional use I get it. External partners BYOD'ing also makes sense.
I think we had some Zebra TCx devices, or if not something very similar. They were pricey, but for extensive usage at our scale, probably not far off price competitive with your pricing. We also only had a few for a specialised use-case, mostly we used cheaper devices without the built-in scanners, and laptop/desktop hardware when mobility wasn't as important.
> Regarding the pricing...
Good FAQ answers on that one. That's my concerns addressed there! Enterprise pricing for offline support makes sense. Periodic reporting also sounds reasonable.
[^1]: Except... that time someone left a barcode scanner with the trigger depressed on a desk once and because we made an API call on a scan, it brought down the site and database. Thankfully a quick fix and some protections and rate limiting solved it from ever causing an issue again, but a funny issue.
Fair point regarding the benefit of being able to use the on-screen (or external even) keyboard for testing! A lot of apps that do barcode scanning have that as a fallback if the code is unreadable/destroyed.
And I agree that for large warehouses the cost of having a fleet of managed, dedicated devices is amortized pretty quickly.
We didn't. We were able to use regular <input> fields and handle input in all the ways we already knew how to support well. It had the added benefit that manual testing during development could also be done with the keyboard which meant we didn't need to give engineers any specialised hardware most of the time.
The flexibility also helped when we ran certain processes in the warehouse in different ways. We (engineering) learnt a while after we had put the system into action that sometimes people in the warehouse weren't using a phone with an attached or built-in scanner, but were sometimes using a Chromebook with a scanning gun. They'd use this for various bulk processing, or supervisors would use this because they worked mostly in the non-mobile tools or needed the productivity of a bigger screen and laptop over a phone.
I guess the overall thing here though was that we just never thought about barcode scanning because it never came up as an issue[^1].
> I have some experience with Zebra TCx devices ... but they're quite expensive. Many companies...BYOD... Also some companies ... rely on external partners ... where you don't know what kind of device they'll use.
This is a fair point. We didn't BYOD because these devices were in constant use in a busy warehouse and personal phones wouldn't have cut it in terms of reliability, but for more occasional use I get it. External partners BYOD'ing also makes sense.
I think we had some Zebra TCx devices, or if not something very similar. They were pricey, but for extensive usage at our scale, probably not far off price competitive with your pricing. We also only had a few for a specialised use-case, mostly we used cheaper devices without the built-in scanners, and laptop/desktop hardware when mobility wasn't as important.
> Regarding the pricing...
Good FAQ answers on that one. That's my concerns addressed there! Enterprise pricing for offline support makes sense. Periodic reporting also sounds reasonable.
[^1]: Except... that time someone left a barcode scanner with the trigger depressed on a desk once and because we made an API call on a scan, it brought down the site and database. Thankfully a quick fix and some protections and rate limiting solved it from ever causing an issue again, but a funny issue.