Mail-in Rebates are mail-in fun!

We’re trying to drum up support for a new-ish barcode scanner that’s out from our friends at Metrologic. They may be changing their name to Honeywell Imaging and Mobility, which I’m sure won’t confuse customers or diminish their long standing branding and image as makers of kickass barcode scanners. So for the next month and a half, we’re offering a mail-in rebate on the Metrologic VoyagerGS. The GS stands for Gun-Style, though when I first listed it I thought up a ton of other phrases that fit the acronym. I think Gorilla Slapper was the company favorite, though I giggled incessantly at Grabby Senior.

Otherwise, we’re working on trying to pretty up the site and add some features that make us unique snowflakes in the blizzard that is online point of sale retail. I’ll let you know when those hit; I’m sure you’re DYING to learn about it.

If I start getting google hits for people searching for Grabby Senior, I’ll make another post to reinforce it.

Preh Touchkey

Hey this is a keyboard that actually seems cool. Not quite Optimus cool, but it’s still unique and could be rad for all sorts of nerds. The Preh Touchkey keyboard has a touchscreen LCD built into it and hooks into an xml driver app to contextually change the layout depending on what commands have been entered on the touchscreen or the physical keys.

It’s a pretty basic screen, monochrome and you can put shapes & stuff on it, but it could be totally awesome for like WoW players, being able to use the buttons on the side to bring up different skill lists for different encounters. Even better, the Preh Keyboards can be programmed to have something like 65k inputs, with timing & looping, per keystroke, so you could program it to get you from town to town or fight monsters for you. You still have to be there to push the button, but now you can like eat a sammich or watch cartoons instead!

And like every other POS Keyboard in existence, the TouchKey was designed to withstand howitzer fire pretty much. Each key is rated at 30 million full actuations, or 10 minutes of killing zombies in Diablo II.

Meta descriptions are so fun!

As I’ve mentioned before, we review products that we sell. It’s no big secret that 95% of the POS retailers out there probably have a good handle on their product lines, but they don’t share that with the customer. Maybe they just like to feel special. I don’t know. Anyway, we’ve got about 35 reviews up live right now, but we’re not getting a lot of traffic through them, so my boss had me check out the metadata to see if anything weird was going on there. I give it a look and find out that half of them are identical to our template. No biggie, just means I have to make words up so Google looks at the pages and says “Ohhhhhhh, that’s a Symbol MC35 review, awesome!” instead of “Ohhh that’s a pos review what is that again?”

So I spent about a day whittling away at these descriptions, making them actually reference the product properly, as well as a little blurb about the contents. It was challenging after a while to be unique for each review. I’m pretty sure every 5th one has the same format with different main words. Oh well. It’s the thought that counts.

I don’t know when the site’s going to get crawled again, but here’s hoping that helps bump them up a bit too.

POS-X are Some Fancy Lads

We’ve worked pretty closely with POS-X over the past few years. They’re our go-to hardware for creating complete solutions, mostly because all their equipment works together with minimum headache and a minimal destruction of your pocketbook. They have a lineup featuring a few barcode scanners, receipt printers, cash drawers, touch screen monitors, and all-in-one PCs, and they’re always striving to give the customer what they need.

This relationship means they give us a heads up when new products are getting prepped to be unleashed on the teeming POS masses, and they’ve pushed through a pretty solid spec bump to a lot of their products in the past month or two.

I worked in tech support when their Xm90 credit card reader was first being sold, and I gotta tell you, I had more headaches with strange build quality, permanent documentation typos, and inconsistent data transmission, than with any other credit card reader/barcode scanner/player piano I had to support. Thankfully they finally got the Xm95 out in the wild, which feels a lot sturdier, sends data accurately, and is pretty straightforward to configure.

Their Xr500 printer, which has been a solid thermal receipt workhorse for the past 3 years, has been retired and replaced with the Xr510. Mostly changes under the hood, the Xr510 is better, faster, stronger. Right here is where you should make the 6 million dollar man slo-mo jump noise. The 7.9″ per second print speed is about 30% faster than the predecessor, and they’ve managed to cram in heavier duty internals to ensure longer use.

The Xr210 impact printer is a full departure from their Xr200, and actually looks kind of foreboding, at least in our main product pic. POS-X decided that Serial and Parallel weren’t enough, and decided to hook the Xr210 up with USB and Ethernet interface options as well. Excellent, since finding Serial and Parallel ports on new PCs is more difficult than spotting the Yeti on a bottle of Koakanee. It’s there. Believe me.

As for the last update, the Xp8200 pole display takes all the good features in pole displays and ignores the pitfalls and caveats that seem to permeate the market. While the Xp800 couldn’t rotate, the Xp8200’s screen can spin a full 360 degrees. People may not need a 15″ display height, so they made it adjustable. And nobody on the market really provides easily changed command modes (emulations), and so POS-X put the comfigurability of the Xp8000 in overdrive, adding Logic Controls support now. It really is the best pole display I’ve seen on the market.

Sharing Our Knowledge for Fun and Profit

Over the past month or so, we’ve been hammering out a plan to get a few more people from the company writing about their experiences. I’d like to introduce the newest member of the club, our support manager. He’s been dropping knowledge bombs here for about 4 years, and was actually the person who hired me on to be a tech nerd in the first place.

He’ll be better equipped to explain the ins and outs of his job, but usually he’s fielding the calls that his army of tech nerds can’t handle anymore. The customers who can be heard, over the phone, in the other room. The one who we’re still talking to despite every other word coming out of their mouth being an explitive.

In the coming weeks we’ll be adding in some sales success stories. The ones that really explain why we love what we do, and may help you out if you’re looking into adding data capture or pos hardware to your business but don’t know where to start.

Not too much is going on for big interesting stuff, I may have a post in a couple days about POS-X doing a pretty solid product shakeup or their receipt printer and pos accessory lineup.

Unitech Mobile Printers

One of the manufacturers we carry, Unitech, strives to make low-cost solutions for customers. Their mobile computer line, including the PA500 and PA600, have been tremendous in helping a lot of customers who want to go mobile with inventory management but don’t have the cash to cover a Symbol MC70 or Intermec CN3. It also helps that our market development rep at Unitech is a really great guy who checks in from time to time to make sure we’ve got the resources and literature necessary to sell their products.

At the Denver event where I made 50 bucks, they had the general manufacturer showroom, where we, as VARs, get to see what kind of new equipment is coming out and maybe make new contacts at companies we don’t have a close relationship with yet. It’s basically schmoozing while eating appetizers and drinking beer.

Unitech was at the event, and they actually had a couple completely new products to show off that really are great. The MP200 and MP300 are their 2″  and 3″ mobile receipt printers, and they definitely fill a niche that has long been devoid of competition. What sets them apart from the competition is something they’ve done with the PA500 and PA600. Both units ship with the MP200 and MP300 drivers preinstalled, meaning all you have to do is set up the Bluetooth, IrDA, or serial connection between the two devices and you’re set. This creates an incredibly easy to setup solution for a lot of customers who may be hesitant when it comes to driver installation and configuration, and it definitely gives Unitech something that the competition doesn’t.

Unitech ships the units with everything you need to get set up, just like with their mobile computer line, so there is much less of a headache when making the purchase. I really like the care that Unitech puts into making sure the end user can get up and running quickly and easily.

Web2.0 Nets Me 50 Bucks

This is a quick post while I’m on vacation. I probably should post more than once a month anyway…

Went to a conference last week and learned about leveraging Web2.0 technologies to better grow visibility of our company and find more solid employees. It was interesting, and gave me a lot of ideas that I’ll have to flesh out for the next month. At one point in the discussion we had a “Stand up until something on the list doesn’t apply to you” activity, covering things such as blogging, forum posts, putting videos on the youtube, etc. Well halfway through I was the only person standing, and pretty sure I was the youngest person there by a good 15 years, my cohort excluded.

Apparently it was one of the first times someone made it through the whole activity, and the speaker gave me 50 bucks. I was stoked. Totally going to spend it on a nice steak dinner.

And, to link it to work somewhat, check out the homepage. The title was a placeholder until our graphic design master threw the 60’s-style background up there.

Learning new things

I’ve been spending the lions share of my time working on implementing a better, more efficient method for storing our product data. This means my boss tells me a table has everything we could sell ever, but it needs cleaning. So this also means I’ve spent the past couple weeks learning to not fear update and delete queries. They’re the scariest things ever.

It’s also meant restructuring the feeds we create for product comparison sites. I’m pretty sure product comparison sites were created to accelerate growth of gray hair, ulcers, and countless other annoyances that shouldn’t be hitting people in their mid twenties. It seems to me that the sites realize they’re a main source of income for many online retailers, and so they can control what kind of hoops must be covered before a feed goes live. Or whether or not your 12,000 entry csv only has 450 records. I will say, however, that of all of the ones I’ve dealt with, Google base is the most easy to get into. I didn’t have all the fields mapped identically, but they were imported with no problem whatsoever.

So, in a month and a half, I’ve gotten a crash course in Access’ methods for queries, table linking, and filter criteria. It’s nice in that it’s very graphical, anytime you want to link two tables you just gotta drag one field onto its complement in another table. And, thankfully, if you feel silly doing that, there’s a nice way to see the SQL query and actually write it like our nerdy forefathers intended.

Jockeying for Position on Google

I would say that on an average day, 20% of my time is spent making sure the new content I’m creating is keyword laden. It’s no secret that sites try to game search engines, and it’s not secret that it’s a difficult balancing act between creating solid readable content and falling into the oblivion of crap squatted domains. What makes this suprisingly difficult is that every couple of weeks a new site will pop up, vying for that coveted first spot on google’s search results for “barcode scanners“, “homing pigeons“, or “words ending in q.”

Last week we dropped off the first page, and our best guess was that the product spotlight feature was not adding to the overall SEOness of the page. It was a few images with links to complete solutions with no real content. So it was up to me to hammer out a few paragraphs about some products that are fancy and try to pepper it with our keywords. Normally it takes me a couple days to pick the products, find an angle, and then write about it. Around Groundhog Day, I wanted to do a whole thing where I wrote a description then repeated some text. Apparently that joke was too esoteric for mass appeal. Though claiming our product listing scheme involved trying product names to homing pigeons and racing for what gets top nods is okay.

I’m extra worried at this point but manage to hammer out something in about an hour that makes sense to people and is still seasoned with keywords appropriately. I was proud of that speed, I’m really putting my Math background to good use. The day after the content is put up on our local site for review purposes, I notice we’ve jumped back up where we were in google rankings. I’m stoked about that. Extra stoked. Turns out one of the sites taking up two spots (I still want that sub-link below our main listing on google. That’d be so rad.) had identical content to yet another site right above it. Suffice to say, it fell off pretty quickly.

But I would be remiss to leave my 3 hours of work off the site, so there’s a whole deal on cordless barcode scanners up on the site. Pretty sweet deal, they use RF or BlueTooth to give you extra range from your equipment and to prevent you from tripping or getting into a wicked game of double-dutch. So if you got heavy products and don’t want to drop a nut, or if they’re hard to reach, Costco Employees, these cordless scanners provide a fair bit of convenience.

And, as a sidenote, in the couple days it took me to write this, our position went from 10, to 5, to 9, to 6, and now to 8 on our preferred keyword.

Motorola Scanvisor

Given my position as glad hander, manufacturer buddy, and product manager, I get to see a lot of the new stuff manufacturers are trying, generally on the day it’s released.

The Motorola Scanvisor is a pretty new thing from our Motorolian/Symboliotic friends. Motorymbol’s doing a lot to help the customer tell the difference between their product line and intended uses, and I know our sales staff and the end user are going to really dig it. For instance, it doesn’t seem like there are huge differences between the Symbol LS4208 and LS3008 aside from the paint job. Bright yellow=industrial, btw. The scan engines are comparable, they have similar warranties, but the LS3008 is designed for environments needing sterile equipment and can be cleaned with no ill harm. I kind of want to toss one in the dish washer and see how it fares.

I know this just from hacking through data sheets, spec information, and putting the products on the site. Customers aren’t going to have such an intimate knowledge of barcode scanners, and maybe our categorization doesn’t match their industry properly. The ScanVisor now lets them search by industry, environment, and myriad other uses as well as let them compare products. And it’s all in flash, which, as we know, is one of the many ways to tell if something’s high-tech.

I’d really like to apply a similar technique to our product review data so customers can find the right scanner with minimal work. Maybe have some input fields for different values, such as scan range, wireless capability, seal specification, etc. So then if they need a barcode scanner that can read from contact to 8 inches and has bluetooth capabilities, they can get a Metrologic FocusBT or Symbol LS4278.

Regarding the request for video of barcode scanner chucking, it’ll have to wait until I can find our Hi8 camera. But it should be awesome. Really really awesome.