Brothas and Sistas Guide to Implementing Barcode QR Code Solutions using ASP.NET MVC4 to Empower the Hood with Mobile Commerce
I uploaded code to the Global Urban Collective Facebook group allowing cats to incorporate QR codes and Barcodes into their ASP.NET MVC4 web site to enable mobile commerce activity. The code is actually fairly simple to implement and customize as I designed it for newbie tech entrepreneurial brothas and sistas to quickly kick start economic activity through mobile commerce in our hoods. In this article, we are going to talk about barcodes and QR codes and talk about how to implement mobile commerce solutions among retailers and micro-entrepreneurs.
At the Global Urban Collective Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/globalurbancollective/), I posted a reference to a recent study stating 57% of respondents prefer to use a mobile web page versus a mobile app for m-commerce activity. Many people commented they also prefer web sites to do shopping via mobile. When I think about my m-commerce activity, I’m displaying a barcode on my phone for Michael’s to scan for a discount. Or I’m on Amazon shopping for a product on the web site, not using the Amazon app. Or I’m using a QR code from LevelUp to make a transaction at a restaurant. So this research result about web sites over mobile apps should be encouraging news to you guys because I have showed yall how to implement m-commerce using a WrapBootStrap template on ASP.NET MVC4 on a $5/month GoDaddy web site for the longest time and during our summer of coding. So let’s talk about mobile commerce then let’s talk about how to use the code.
Backgrounder on Barcodes and QR Codes
The QR code and barcode code I’m providing you to implement in your $5/month ASP.NET MVC4 web site allow your web site customer interact with other systems. Many brothas and sistas are not familiar with barcodes and QR codes so let’s discuss both types of barcode.
Barcodes are known as 1D because it is based on width and spacing of each line for a scanner to read to understand the code. Barcodes use numbers only and usually is about 16 digits and have been in existence for the longest time. You will find barcodes on almost all commercial products in your home and when you shop, barcodes are scanned at the register to look up the item and return the price.
QR codes are known as 2D because it uses a xy height/width scanning technique. QR codes can hold more data using both numbers and letters and other characters to create things like URL. QR codes can even hold a photo image or music file that can be decoded but that will be one serious decoding process. You see QR codes in mobile payment systems and tracking systems where the shipping guy has a mobile scanner.
Now how to you decide to use barcodes over QR codes in your solution? You use barcodes when interfacing with legacy systems such as a cash register that still have the basic barcode scanners. Many registers have existing point of sale systems and will not upgrade for quite some time so you display the 1D barcode to show a discount or special code for their register to know what to do with it. For example, the barcodes on the prepaid gift cards, you can make a mobile prepaid gift card business where consumers just display a barcode on their phone to use at these registers. I believe the Apple Store employees and Microsoft store had mobile attachments that read regular barcodes.
Use QR codes when you are interfacing with mobile devices that use QR code readers through the mobile camera. For example, if you are hosting a small event and send e-tickets like EventBrite does, then the consumer show the QR code on their screen to be scanned by the employee mobile device and read the ticket to see if it is valid. This is also the case for buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) or click-and-collect applications. The advantage of QR codes is they can be read from a distance on a phone screen by a good camera. So while a barcode scanner need to be close up, you can literally read a QR code from 10 to 20 feet with a nice 5MP camera and a large QR code displayed on a 5 inch screen – perfect for drive through services like the grocery pickup model where someone order phone from your mobile app and go to the drive through and show their QR code for pickup.
Barcode QR Code Transactional Use Cases
The goal of using barcode and QR codes in your mobile web site is to engage in transactional activity that create economic activity which is part of economic development. Your goal as an entrepreneur looking to empower the hood is to look at ways we can implement transactions in the hood to kick start economic activity to create jobs and opportunities for our people. As we go through the business use cases, you will see how relatively straightforward and easy it is for our people to improve existing hood businesses and create new business models in our communities creating a new wave of economic activity and job creation, just from a $5/month GoDaddy web site. Let’s get started.
Membership Service. This is where you charge a monthly fee direct debit from a checking account for membership to a facility like a fitness gym or a member-only Laundromat. When the customer login, they can click on the link called “membership card” which display the image of the barcode to be scanned by the attendant. A customer can also print out the barcode as a backup copy if they forget their phone.
Mobile Payments. This is peer-to-peer payments where one person display a QR code to another person to transfer a payment to each other. This enables transactions for small businesses like barbershops and salons and plumbers to conduct cashless transactions and a record of receipt that a transaction occurred between the two. Or like M-Pesa or Western Union, print out a barcode to take to a station to receive cash to enable remittance activity.
Prepaid Gift Cards. Create a system that allow consumers to “gift” prepaid cards to others to shop at local businesses in the community. The virtual gift card has a prepaid balance the customer topped up. At checkout, the consumer show a barcode on their mobile phone and valid ID to make a prepaid purchase which is deducted from their virtual gift card account.
Virtual Coupons. Create a discount system that allow consumers to show a barcode on their mobile phone and when scanned, it works like any other coupon registered in the system. This allow cats to create coupon and discount programs in the hood for small merchants to run promotional campaigns.
Click-And-Collect. From an e-commerce web site after a person does the checkout and complete the order, send an email to the user with the QR code or barcode to bring to the pickup station to retrieve their order. The barcode can also be on the web site when the customer log in to see previous orders. Then the barcode is scanned and the retailer is notified the customer arrived and bring them their order. Then the customer sit and wait their turn and when they scan again, the order is immediately brought out. This can be done for the cube shop business model, the grocery pickup model and the Groupon store business model and also QR code shopping walls.
Ticketing. Sell tickets online to an event or a small gathering and each customer will get a barcode that will be scanned by the ticket collector holding a mobile device with a QR code scanner. This can be for one event or it can be a service to provide to pop-up exhibits and shows in the hood such as a traveling gospel act in a park in the hood where someone can do a small gospel festival or take a tour of an urban botanical garden created by ex-cons in the hood giving beauty back to the community they once destroyed living a life of crime.
Inventory Management. Allow employees to bring out barcodes to place on items for sale or rent to track their whereabouts. So get one of those Avery stickers things where you print out labels and print barcodes on each one and place on an item like a product system service item to rent out in a circular economic fashion or an USB power bank rental. That allow you to track items as they are sold or rented and check-in and checkout as they are being scanned during each transaction of customer picking up, purchasing or returning.
There are plenty of more uses such as creating a parking lot in the hood where a person can prepay to park when the hood is next to a stadium or near downtown to generate new income. Or setup a prepaid system for a food truck park or like Taste of Chicago where people pay with a barcode instead of exchange cash. But in all of the examples above, you see what is going to empower our community and that is enabling people to conduct transactions. All the worthless cats on discussion panels, in Facebook groups talking about economic empowerment and group economics when all you have to do to kick start economic activity is use code Dream and Hustle providing you to use on a $5/month GoDaddy web site – think about it.
How to Use the ASP.NET MVC4 Code
The code I put on the Global Urban Collective Facebook group under the file section is a rework of code I found on the Code Project web site to create barcodes and QR codes. But I rewrote it in a way so it can just be a simple way to call and use it. This is why it is important for you to learn how to code so you can read code and if it is open license, modify the code to suite your needs.
Copy all of the files and folders into your existing ASP.NET MVC4 C# project that you see in the file. Also, make sure you manually Add Reference to System.Drawing under the References section of your own web site because this library is needed to draw the barcode images for display. Remember, the Global Urban Collective Facebook group is the place to ask questions if you trying to get things to work as I will not answer any technical questions in this blog comment section.
To reference the barcode and QR code, all you have to is reference an image tag for example:
< img src=”/barcode/qrcode/test1″ / >
< img src=”/barcode/barcode/1234567812345678?header=Membership” / >
That’s it! Yes, that all you now have to do. This is what makes ASP.NET MVC the preferred platform here to help you create these solutions. For the QR code image above, if you scan it, it will say “test1” and all you have to do to change the QR code message is change the “test1” with a URL and we will talk about that later. Now, for the barcode set, there is an additional parameter that is optional and the ?=header will show a message above the top of the barcode.
Now when you want to create transactions, what you do is create a unique code in C# using Guid.NewGUID() to create a new unique id or use NewID() in SQL Server to create a unique id. If you want to implement a unique 16 digit number, what you want to do is create a 16 digit random generator and you can find these on the Internet as a C# doing a search and what you do is check to see if the number already exist before insert to make sure each line is unique.
So let’s say you doing a shopping wall service on a 40-inch digital signage that slide back and forth using the Revolution slider off WrapBootStrap template – which is really awesome as heck if I show you what it look like. You have an image 12345678.jpg which is the product id and you display barcode/qrcode/123456.jpg to generate the qr code automatically. Now one of the things I’m not writing out is putting the full URL at the end of the code. The reason I did not do that is because you may want to use this as a general service such as inventory. If you are having problems with the URL, then use the URLEncode() and URLDecode() function to place URLs in the image tag and I will show how to do that at the Global Urban Collective Facebook group.
Getting Started
In this article, we provided code to help tech entrepreneur brothas and sistas establish mobile commerce activity in our hoods to generate transactional activity to create economic activity that create jobs and businesses and quality of life in our communities. There is so much possibilities to list here about what can be done but we provided a general direction to how to use mobile commerce. At this point, you should know how to create ASP.NET MVC4, how to use SQL Server to design and how to create components like memberships and now you know how to use QR code and barcodes. In reality, I just showed you brothas and sistas the skills to get a $110K-$200K jobs working worldwide from London to Shanghai on next generation m-commerce business models. But I also showed you cats how to create empires in the hood to generate billions in economic revenue and transactional activity also. Either way, you got plenty of opportunities to get your hustle up in the next 6 months.
Now for a case study, let’s talk about Stony | Ellis which is the crowdfunded discounting service we coming out with for the holiday season to help small business run discounting programs to compete with big box stores. The way we set this business model up is similar to LevelUp – the merchant use as a second screen a Wi-Fi only iPad or Samsung Tab or Dell Venue and the paying customer display the QR code for the tablet to read and goes to the ASP.NET MVC link /coupon/redeem/1234567 and we validate the customer and the code and if success, on the screen side facing the merchant a 1D barcode is displayed for the merchant to scan with a laser barcode scanner to input the coupon into their system. We send an email to both the customer and the merchant to let them know the coupon was applied.
So as you see, we can do so much for our hoods right now with mobile commerce and it is not hard to setup. Let’s take time to start creating the solutions right now for our hoods and setup business models and web services so our hoods can use mobile commerce to do for self, our people, our community and our future.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2014/10/brothas-and-sistas-guide-to-implementing-barcode-qr-code-solutions-using-asp-net-mvc4-to-empower-the-hood-with-mobile-commerce/
I uploaded code to the Global Urban Collective Facebook group allowing cats to incorporate QR codes and Barcodes into their ASP.NET MVC4 web site to enable mobile commerce activity. The code is actually fairly simple to implement and customize as I designed it for newbie tech entrepreneurial brothas and sistas to quickly kick start economic activity through mobile commerce in our hoods. In this article, we are going to talk about barcodes and QR codes and talk about how to implement mobile commerce solutions among retailers and micro-entrepreneurs.
At the Global Urban Collective Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/globalurbancollective/), I posted a reference to a recent study stating 57% of respondents prefer to use a mobile web page versus a mobile app for m-commerce activity. Many people commented they also prefer web sites to do shopping via mobile. When I think about my m-commerce activity, I’m displaying a barcode on my phone for Michael’s to scan for a discount. Or I’m on Amazon shopping for a product on the web site, not using the Amazon app. Or I’m using a QR code from LevelUp to make a transaction at a restaurant. So this research result about web sites over mobile apps should be encouraging news to you guys because I have showed yall how to implement m-commerce using a WrapBootStrap template on ASP.NET MVC4 on a $5/month GoDaddy web site for the longest time and during our summer of coding. So let’s talk about mobile commerce then let’s talk about how to use the code.
Backgrounder on Barcodes and QR Codes
The QR code and barcode code I’m providing you to implement in your $5/month ASP.NET MVC4 web site allow your web site customer interact with other systems. Many brothas and sistas are not familiar with barcodes and QR codes so let’s discuss both types of barcode.
Barcodes are known as 1D because it is based on width and spacing of each line for a scanner to read to understand the code. Barcodes use numbers only and usually is about 16 digits and have been in existence for the longest time. You will find barcodes on almost all commercial products in your home and when you shop, barcodes are scanned at the register to look up the item and return the price.
QR codes are known as 2D because it uses a xy height/width scanning technique. QR codes can hold more data using both numbers and letters and other characters to create things like URL. QR codes can even hold a photo image or music file that can be decoded but that will be one serious decoding process. You see QR codes in mobile payment systems and tracking systems where the shipping guy has a mobile scanner.
Now how to you decide to use barcodes over QR codes in your solution? You use barcodes when interfacing with legacy systems such as a cash register that still have the basic barcode scanners. Many registers have existing point of sale systems and will not upgrade for quite some time so you display the 1D barcode to show a discount or special code for their register to know what to do with it. For example, the barcodes on the prepaid gift cards, you can make a mobile prepaid gift card business where consumers just display a barcode on their phone to use at these registers. I believe the Apple Store employees and Microsoft store had mobile attachments that read regular barcodes.
Use QR codes when you are interfacing with mobile devices that use QR code readers through the mobile camera. For example, if you are hosting a small event and send e-tickets like EventBrite does, then the consumer show the QR code on their screen to be scanned by the employee mobile device and read the ticket to see if it is valid. This is also the case for buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) or click-and-collect applications. The advantage of QR codes is they can be read from a distance on a phone screen by a good camera. So while a barcode scanner need to be close up, you can literally read a QR code from 10 to 20 feet with a nice 5MP camera and a large QR code displayed on a 5 inch screen – perfect for drive through services like the grocery pickup model where someone order phone from your mobile app and go to the drive through and show their QR code for pickup.
Barcode QR Code Transactional Use Cases
The goal of using barcode and QR codes in your mobile web site is to engage in transactional activity that create economic activity which is part of economic development. Your goal as an entrepreneur looking to empower the hood is to look at ways we can implement transactions in the hood to kick start economic activity to create jobs and opportunities for our people. As we go through the business use cases, you will see how relatively straightforward and easy it is for our people to improve existing hood businesses and create new business models in our communities creating a new wave of economic activity and job creation, just from a $5/month GoDaddy web site. Let’s get started.
Membership Service. This is where you charge a monthly fee direct debit from a checking account for membership to a facility like a fitness gym or a member-only Laundromat. When the customer login, they can click on the link called “membership card” which display the image of the barcode to be scanned by the attendant. A customer can also print out the barcode as a backup copy if they forget their phone.
Mobile Payments. This is peer-to-peer payments where one person display a QR code to another person to transfer a payment to each other. This enables transactions for small businesses like barbershops and salons and plumbers to conduct cashless transactions and a record of receipt that a transaction occurred between the two. Or like M-Pesa or Western Union, print out a barcode to take to a station to receive cash to enable remittance activity.
Prepaid Gift Cards. Create a system that allow consumers to “gift” prepaid cards to others to shop at local businesses in the community. The virtual gift card has a prepaid balance the customer topped up. At checkout, the consumer show a barcode on their mobile phone and valid ID to make a prepaid purchase which is deducted from their virtual gift card account.
Virtual Coupons. Create a discount system that allow consumers to show a barcode on their mobile phone and when scanned, it works like any other coupon registered in the system. This allow cats to create coupon and discount programs in the hood for small merchants to run promotional campaigns.
Click-And-Collect. From an e-commerce web site after a person does the checkout and complete the order, send an email to the user with the QR code or barcode to bring to the pickup station to retrieve their order. The barcode can also be on the web site when the customer log in to see previous orders. Then the barcode is scanned and the retailer is notified the customer arrived and bring them their order. Then the customer sit and wait their turn and when they scan again, the order is immediately brought out. This can be done for the cube shop business model, the grocery pickup model and the Groupon store business model and also QR code shopping walls.
Ticketing. Sell tickets online to an event or a small gathering and each customer will get a barcode that will be scanned by the ticket collector holding a mobile device with a QR code scanner. This can be for one event or it can be a service to provide to pop-up exhibits and shows in the hood such as a traveling gospel act in a park in the hood where someone can do a small gospel festival or take a tour of an urban botanical garden created by ex-cons in the hood giving beauty back to the community they once destroyed living a life of crime.
Inventory Management. Allow employees to bring out barcodes to place on items for sale or rent to track their whereabouts. So get one of those Avery stickers things where you print out labels and print barcodes on each one and place on an item like a product system service item to rent out in a circular economic fashion or an USB power bank rental. That allow you to track items as they are sold or rented and check-in and checkout as they are being scanned during each transaction of customer picking up, purchasing or returning.
There are plenty of more uses such as creating a parking lot in the hood where a person can prepay to park when the hood is next to a stadium or near downtown to generate new income. Or setup a prepaid system for a food truck park or like Taste of Chicago where people pay with a barcode instead of exchange cash. But in all of the examples above, you see what is going to empower our community and that is enabling people to conduct transactions. All the worthless cats on discussion panels, in Facebook groups talking about economic empowerment and group economics when all you have to do to kick start economic activity is use code Dream and Hustle providing you to use on a $5/month GoDaddy web site – think about it.
How to Use the ASP.NET MVC4 Code
The code I put on the Global Urban Collective Facebook group under the file section is a rework of code I found on the Code Project web site to create barcodes and QR codes. But I rewrote it in a way so it can just be a simple way to call and use it. This is why it is important for you to learn how to code so you can read code and if it is open license, modify the code to suite your needs.
Copy all of the files and folders into your existing ASP.NET MVC4 C# project that you see in the file. Also, make sure you manually Add Reference to System.Drawing under the References section of your own web site because this library is needed to draw the barcode images for display. Remember, the Global Urban Collective Facebook group is the place to ask questions if you trying to get things to work as I will not answer any technical questions in this blog comment section.
To reference the barcode and QR code, all you have to is reference an image tag for example:
< img src=”/barcode/qrcode/test1″ / >
< img src=”/barcode/barcode/1234567812345678?header=Membership” / >
That’s it! Yes, that all you now have to do. This is what makes ASP.NET MVC the preferred platform here to help you create these solutions. For the QR code image above, if you scan it, it will say “test1” and all you have to do to change the QR code message is change the “test1” with a URL and we will talk about that later. Now, for the barcode set, there is an additional parameter that is optional and the ?=header will show a message above the top of the barcode.
Now when you want to create transactions, what you do is create a unique code in C# using Guid.NewGUID() to create a new unique id or use NewID() in SQL Server to create a unique id. If you want to implement a unique 16 digit number, what you want to do is create a 16 digit random generator and you can find these on the Internet as a C# doing a search and what you do is check to see if the number already exist before insert to make sure each line is unique.
So let’s say you doing a shopping wall service on a 40-inch digital signage that slide back and forth using the Revolution slider off WrapBootStrap template – which is really awesome as heck if I show you what it look like. You have an image 12345678.jpg which is the product id and you display barcode/qrcode/123456.jpg to generate the qr code automatically. Now one of the things I’m not writing out is putting the full URL at the end of the code. The reason I did not do that is because you may want to use this as a general service such as inventory. If you are having problems with the URL, then use the URLEncode() and URLDecode() function to place URLs in the image tag and I will show how to do that at the Global Urban Collective Facebook group.
Getting Started
In this article, we provided code to help tech entrepreneur brothas and sistas establish mobile commerce activity in our hoods to generate transactional activity to create economic activity that create jobs and businesses and quality of life in our communities. There is so much possibilities to list here about what can be done but we provided a general direction to how to use mobile commerce. At this point, you should know how to create ASP.NET MVC4, how to use SQL Server to design and how to create components like memberships and now you know how to use QR code and barcodes. In reality, I just showed you brothas and sistas the skills to get a $110K-$200K jobs working worldwide from London to Shanghai on next generation m-commerce business models. But I also showed you cats how to create empires in the hood to generate billions in economic revenue and transactional activity also. Either way, you got plenty of opportunities to get your hustle up in the next 6 months.
Now for a case study, let’s talk about Stony | Ellis which is the crowdfunded discounting service we coming out with for the holiday season to help small business run discounting programs to compete with big box stores. The way we set this business model up is similar to LevelUp – the merchant use as a second screen a Wi-Fi only iPad or Samsung Tab or Dell Venue and the paying customer display the QR code for the tablet to read and goes to the ASP.NET MVC link /coupon/redeem/1234567 and we validate the customer and the code and if success, on the screen side facing the merchant a 1D barcode is displayed for the merchant to scan with a laser barcode scanner to input the coupon into their system. We send an email to both the customer and the merchant to let them know the coupon was applied.
So as you see, we can do so much for our hoods right now with mobile commerce and it is not hard to setup. Let’s take time to start creating the solutions right now for our hoods and setup business models and web services so our hoods can use mobile commerce to do for self, our people, our community and our future.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2014/10/brothas-and-sistas-guide-to-implementing-barcode-qr-code-solutions-using-asp-net-mvc4-to-empower-the-hood-with-mobile-commerce/
