I run an online store that supplies educational tools for teachers, homeschoolers, and co-ops. When we launched, it was just me, my spouse, and a couple of friends boxing up phonics games and STEM kits from my garage. At the time, I thought the hardest part of the business would be building the website or sourcing the right products.
I was wrong.
The real pain came later—when we had a few hundred SKUs, a small warehouse, and no clue where half our inventory was.
Things slipped slowly. First, it was just little mistakes. Missing items, mislabeled bins. Then it became phone calls from frustrated customers who didn’t get what they ordered. Finally, one day we found two unopened boxes of math manipulatives in a corner—stuff we’d already marked as sold out for weeks. That was the wake-up call.
Trying to Tame Chaos with Paper and Spreadsheets
Like a lot of small businesses, our first instinct was to use what we already had—clipboards and Google Sheets. Everyone had access, and we set up a simple system: if you took something from a shelf, you logged it.
It worked for about a month. Then someone forgot to update the sheet. Then another person copied the wrong formula down a column. At one point we had “negative five” units of a best-selling flashcard set, which would’ve been funny if it weren’t such a headache.
We tried printing out sheets and doing manual counts once a week, but by that point, things were too disorganized for that to fix anything.
Barcodes Brought Hope (and a New Set of Problems)
We decided to take the leap to a barcode system. We bought some affordable scanners, printed our own barcodes, and spent an entire weekend relabeling everything in the warehouse. For the first couple of months, it felt like magic.
Scan an item, click a button, and everything updated in real time. No more transcription errors. No more squinting at a messy spreadsheet.
But it wasn’t long before we hit the ceiling.
Barcodes need line of sight. That meant pulling every item out of every bin to scan it. Our cycle counts started taking entire afternoons again. Worse, when we did miss something—a misprinted tag or a box that fell behind a shelf—it wasn’t obvious. We only found out when customer orders went sideways.
Barcodes were better than spreadsheets, no doubt. But for us, they weren’t enough.
Stumbling into RFID (and Getting Obsessed)
RFID wasn’t even on our radar until one of our team members mentioned it offhand while talking about how big retailers track merchandise. I went home that night and started reading everything I could.
RFID, or radio frequency identification, uses chips and scanners to detect items wirelessly. No line of sight required. No individual item scanning. You can walk through a space with a handheld reader and it picks up everything within range.
It sounded futuristic—and maybe too good to be true. But the more I researched, the more I saw companies our size using it with success.
The Shift to RFID Inventory Tracking
That phrase—RFID inventory tracking—became a daily part of my vocabulary. I watched videos, read white papers, lurked in warehouse operations forums. Eventually, we reached out to a few providers.
One stood out: Datascan. Their system seemed built for people like us—growing e-commerce businesses that weren’t ready to invest in full-scale robotics but needed real visibility into what was happening in the warehouse.
Their handheld RFID readers were easy to learn, and their tagging solutions worked with our existing product lines. We didn’t need to overhaul our storage system or change our shelving layout. Just tag, scan, and go.
Testing the Waters with a Pilot Program
We started small: one aisle, 200 SKUs, mostly math and science items. It took a few days to tag everything, but the payoff came quickly.
The first full scan of that section took five minutes. That same task had taken over two hours with barcodes. I stood there, staring at the dashboard on my laptop, thinking, “Is that it?”
We double-checked the numbers. They matched. Perfectly.
That was all the proof we needed. We started tagging the rest of the inventory that same week.
What Happened After RFID Took Over
There were growing pains. Some tags fell off during packing. A few didn’t register until we reprogrammed the readers. But once the kinks were worked out, everything changed.
We weren’t guessing anymore. We knew what was on the shelves. We could run a full warehouse scan in under 30 minutes. Before, that would’ve taken an entire day—and even then, we couldn’t trust the numbers.
The improvements were measurable:
- Inventory accuracy jumped from around 92% to 99.6%
- Weekly cycle counts went from 6–8 hours to under 3
- We saved roughly $1,000/month in labor costs alone
- Customer complaints about incorrect shipments dropped by 80%
But the biggest shift? Peace of mind.
I could walk into the warehouse and ask, “Do we have any of the new phonics boards left?” and get a real answer—without someone digging through boxes. Our staff moved with confidence. Mistakes didn’t pile up.
Comparing the Options Side by Side
We’ve lived through all three systems. Here’s how they break down for us:
- Manual (Paper/Spreadsheets):
- Cost: Free
- Pros: No setup, easy to use
- Cons: Slow, error-prone, impossible to scale
- Barcodes:
- Cost: Moderate
- Pros: Improves accuracy, easy to implement
- Cons: Still manual, requires line-of-sight, slow for large-scale counts
- RFID:
- Cost: High upfront
- Pros: Fast, accurate, scalable, no line-of-sight needed
- Cons: Initial cost and tagging process can be a hurdle
If you’re small and just starting out, spreadsheets might be fine. If you’re moving boxes in and out weekly, barcodes are a step up. But if you’re serious about growth and need a system that scales with you, RFID is the way.
Inventory Tech Providers to Know
We spoke with a few companies during our transition. These were the ones that kept coming up:
- Manual Solutions:
- Google Sheets or Excel—totally DIY. You can make it work… until you can’t.
- Barcode Providers:
- Wasp Barcode Technologies– Great starter kits, very user-friendly
- Zebra Technologies– Rugged hardware, better for enterprise scale
- RFID Providers:
- Datascan– This is who we chose. Their onboarding process, equipment quality, and support were what sealed it for us. They’ve got a full RFID inventory tracking platform that’s tailored to growing businesses like ours.
You can check them out at datascan.com.
