Thursday, July 27, 2017

How to Use UPC Scanner on PriceCharting to Price Games

Have you ever been at Best Buy or GameStop and seen a clearance sale and wondered "Is that really a good deal?" or "Can I get that game cheaper somewhere else?" You can quickly scan the game and find the price on PriceCharting with any mobile device. Here's how to do it:

1. Download a Free UPC Scanner App
Download a UPC scanner app on your phone. Any one will do BUT it needs offers custom url searches. I recommend Barcode Scanner Pro for Android.

upc scanner app


2. Edit Settings
Click the 'Settings' icon (little gear) and make two changes.

First, toggle on 'Open Webpages Automatically' option.

toggle auto open


Second, edit the 'Custom Search Url' to look like this:
https://www.pricecharting.com/search-products?type=videogames&q=%s


custom search url for scanner



3. Scan A UPC
Find any video game UPC and scan it.

scan a video game upc code


Click 'Custom Search' button
custom search button


4. Success!
You will be redirected to PriceCharting page for that game.

pricecharting after upc search


The same concept works for other UPC scanner apps and even UPC scanners for computers.

Scanner built for computers can be made to automatically fill in the form on PriceCharting so you never have to leave the site when scanning.


21 comments :

Travis Hendricks said...

I should have known it was only a matter of time until an iPhone app was made. It looks like a pretty cool app though.

Anonymous said...

if someone could adapt this for android i'd be really stoked!!!

Christopher said...

Did Alex get some pics back to you? I thought he had when I saw this but then it looks like you just got em from the RL site... I'll go kick him :)

Oh and, the blog's terrible, but the UK VGPC clone creation ain't so bad :) I'd put a link up but... it's secret for now ;)

Anonymous said...

this may work for android as well... they do have a barcode scanner so i would imagine as long you can add the info the same it should work

ill try it out in a few days and let you know

GamesOgre said...

Wooh, thanks for the tip! Between this and the VGT Price Guide iPhone app, my hunting for rare used video games just became a ton easier!

Christopher said...

"this may work for android as well..."

It sould deffinately work, so long as you know how to write an Android app in python using the ASE...


import android
droid = android.Android()
code = droid.scanBarcode()
isbn = int(code['result']['SCAN RESULT'])
url = "http://www.videogamepricecharts.com/search/q?=%d" % isbn
droid.startActivity('android.intent.action.VIEW', url)


Code from mattcutts.com/blog/android-barcode-scanner/

Unknown said...

NiCE POST

JJ said...

I've updated the article to show how to scan UPC's on PriceCharting with any UPC scanning app for iPhone or Android.

The steps above are for one particular app, but they should work on any UPC scanner that offers "custom url" features.

Anonymous said...

It only took you 8+ years!

(Kidding. Thanks, JJ)

JJ said...

@anonymous - Haha. It's been on my to-do list for 8 years.....I'm so glad I can cross it off now :)

Anonymous said...

Got it to work on iOS with the "QR Reader" app. In the app went to Settings > Barcode Settings > Send barcode to web server. Then I input the link above as "https://www.pricecharting.com/search-products?type=videogames&q=[code]", dropping out the "%s" part.

JJ said...

@anonymous - Thank you for update on the iOS implementation.

Unknown said...

Thanks

Anonymous said...

I have tried it with 2 games but both gave no Found result on pricecharting.com . Could this be because it's PAL region games that i scan and can i Fix this problem?
The games where FIFA14 PAL on PS3 and Motorstorm PAL on PS3 ...

JJ said...

We just recently (last 2 months) started supporting PAL UPC codes. We don't have a ton of them yet. We hope to add more in the future so UPC codes will work better for European users.

Unknown said...

hallo so if it is PAL it will not work ? :(

JJ said...

@unknown - Scanning will work with PAL barcodes, but we don't have very many of them yet so the results will not be ideal. You should still see a scanned barcode number, but many of them might return no results until we fill up our UPC list more for PAL region.

Anonymous said...

Feature no longer works, just an orange popup window, and nothing you can scan

Anonymous said...

@anonymous - Sounds like you need to allow images/video capture to work on our website. I don't know the browser you are using but this is how to allow video in Chrome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EHUuvwmQTk

Anonymous said...

would love to see a upc scanner option on the lot calculator.

JJ Hendricks said...

@anonymous - Thanks. We do have a separate UPC scanner option for the Lot Calculator, but if you have a real UPC scanner you can use it on the Lot Calculator. You can look up items via UPC code. This is by far the fastest way to use the Lot Calculator too.

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