A few of the WordPress plugins I have built have been WooCommerce extensions – that is, add-ons to WooThemes’ exceptionally popular eCommerce plugin. Some of these are free, while others are premium extensions available for purchase directly from the WooThemes website. One of these premium extensions that I built is WooCommerce Order Barcodes.
What is it?
WooCommerce Order Barcodes is, as the name suggests, a WooCommerce extension that creates barcodes for each of your orders. The plugin uses open-source Javascript libraries to generate 100% unique barcodes for each order placed through your site. It can handle numerous types of barcodes, from standard types to QR codes.
In addition it can also scan barcodes that have been created for orders. This means that you could, for example, run a hotel booking system and give each of your guests a unique barcode that can be scanned in on arrival and then, on their departure, rescanned to mark that they have checked out. This would create an end-to-end automated booking system.
Who is it built for?
This extension is built for anyone who has a need for scannable barcodes to be attached to their orders. The most obvious use cases are hotel reservations, packing slips and event tickets, but it’s the type of extension for which users will find many and varied implementations.
Interestingly, while the event ticketing side of things works for simple uses, Order Barcodes is not a full solution for that kind of thing. The reason for this is that tickets need a unique barcode for each product (i.e. ticket) in the order. To remedy that I have been working on a full-blown ticketing extension that will integrate with Order Barcodes to provide a complete and versatile ticketing service.[1. We actually used a beta version of the ticketing extension to sell tickets for the first WooCommerce Conference earlier this year.]
Why did I build it?
This is one of the more rare instances where I built a plugin under my own steam that I didn’t actually have an immediate use for myself. In this case my motivation was simply that I saw a missing piece of functionality in the WooCommerce space and I was keen to work out a good solution for providing it.
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