Shared barcodes

A shop meets barcodes it has never entered: new stock, a new supplier, a product the shop down the road already sells. Otura can say what such a barcode is, from two kinds of source, and always says which one each answer came from.

• Open Food Facts, an open database of food and household products, under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).
• Other shops on Otura that chose to share. A name from shops is offered only when two or more other shops gave the same name (your own never counts), and never says which shops. The same goes for a brand or a size.

Turning it on

Open Settings›Workspace›Shared barcodes. Two switches:

• Suggest names for barcodes new to this shop, on by default. While it is on, a scanned code that nothing in Otura knows yet is sent to Open Food Facts to look it up: the barcode, and only the barcode. Otura’s server asks, so nothing says which shop scanned it, and nothing about your shop, its prices or its sales goes with it. Turned off, no code is sent.
• Share this shop’s barcodes and product names, off until you turn it on. It sends each product barcode with the name and brand you gave it, never a price, a cost, stock or sales. When you turn it on, your current catalogue is shared at once. After that what you share follows your catalogue: a product that gets a barcode is shared, a renamed one is shared under its new name, and a deleted one is taken back. Share now brings it in step at once. Turning it off takes back everything you shared.

Where suggestions appear

• At the till, in Code not found (see Codes the till could not find): the name, brand and size, and Suggested by …, before anything is chosen. A name from Open Food Facts also shows its credit line, © Open Food Facts contributors, under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), as its licence asks. When adding the product, the name box starts with the suggested name and shows other names for the code to tap.
• In Products›Unknown scans, the Suggested name column, with its source, and the names Add to the catalogue starts from.
• In a supplier's price-list import (see Import a supplier's price list): a new product whose row has no name takes the suggested one, marked Name from …. The import uses only what Otura already knows; it does not ask Open Food Facts.

When Open Food Facts is asked

When a code is scanned that nothing in Otura knows, the till's popup asks Open Food Facts while it is open, and Unknown scans asks about a few more codes each time the list is opened. The answer is kept for every shop, and the same code is asked again only after three months; a code Open Food Facts does not know is asked again after a week, in case it has been added since. Open Food Facts limits how often it may be asked, so each Otura server asks about at most ten codes a minute, no one shop more than six, and the tills come first: Unknown scans only asks with what the tills leave. Past that, or when Open Food Facts is slow (over 3 seconds) or unavailable, a code shows without a name (at the till, Could not check this code with Open Food Facts just now.), and is asked about the next time it is met.

When sources disagree, the name offered first is, in order: a decision Otura's team made for that barcode; else the name most shops gave; else Open Food Facts. A field the first answer lacks, such as the brand or the size, is filled from the next. A product you create under a suggested name records where the name came from.

Which barcodes

Only product barcodes that mean the same product in every shop (EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A and case codes, with a correct check digit) are shared or looked up. A shop's own codes are not: labels printed by a scale, in-store codes starting with 2, 02 or 04, coupons, and SKUs. A 12-digit UPC and the same code printed with a leading 0 are the same product.