philbish - 1:11 am on Mar 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Made a cool update to the system that's been working fantastic. Useful in so many ways.

With each successful barcode scan of a product, we automatically snap photos of the shipping table, and close-up of the scanning area.

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Example images: [oi54.tinypic.com...]
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We tie these into the order, so on any order page, we can quickly see exactly what was scanned.

We now have a quick visual audit of how the product looked. How it was labeled, packed, etc.

There's six IP cameras covering the shipping table, all at different angles, and zooms.

Technical process:
Shipping is all done through a custom web app. Barcodes are handled by Javascript / ajax. Barcode scanner adds a prefix and suffix "[" and "]". Javascript listens for these characters and then starts writing barcode data to a hidden field. Once it has the barcode, it triggers an ajax call to a php script that uses CURL to download a JPG still from the camera's IP address. Saves it to a temp folder, and then starts uploading it to cloud file hosting. Saves a record in a temp barcode database table. Once the order is shipped, data is transferred from the temp table to the real table. And now all the photos are instantly visible to me and customer service staff.