POS Barcode Scanning Issue – Space in Barcodes

Retail & Point of Sale
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Topic summary

Main issue: Barcodes were printed with a trailing space, so Shopify POS reads them as different values (e.g., 1234567891234 vs. 1234567891234␠), causing lookup failures at checkout.

Constraints: Shopify Admin automatically trims spaces, preventing products from being saved with trailing-space barcodes. The affected batch is already printed and in circulation.

Environment: Zebra DS2208 scanners. Although the scanner can be configured to strip spaces, pairing it with Shopify POS appears to apply Shopify’s own configuration, overriding the scanner’s setting.

Attempts and suggestions: Tried adding a trailing space in Shopify (blocked by trimming). Tried configuring the scanner to always remove spaces; once reconnected to Shopify POS, that setting no longer applies. A community suggestion to set the scanner to strip spaces did not resolve the issue.

Status: Unresolved. Request for Shopify to provide a way to strip spaces from scanned input or avoid overriding scanner configurations, to prevent reprinting/relabelling.

Summarized with AI on December 16. AI used: gpt-5.
1

We are experiencing issues with scanning certain barcodes at the register. It appears that some barcodes were mistakenly printed with a trailing space, causing the system to search for a barcode number that includes this extra space. For example, the barcode “1234567891234” is being read as “1234567891234 ” (with a trailing space).

This error occurred during production, and while we’ll ensure no spaces are printed in future runs, we now have a batch of products with these barcodes already printed.

We’re looking for a solution that allows us to scan the barcodes as they are. We attempted to manually add the space to the barcode in Shopify admin, but the system automatically removes the space.

Could Shopify provide a way to strip the spaces from the scanned barcodes or handle these barcodes correctly? We are using Zebra DS2208 scanners, which can be configured to remove the space, but when connected to Shopify, those configurations are overridden. It seems that part of process of connecting the scanner to the POS, set the barcode scanner with custom configuration setup by Shopify.

We would greatly appreciate any assistance or workaround to resolve this issue (not to reprint and relabel all of our existing inventory).

2

You should be able to do this on your scanner. If you read your scanner software, there is a code you can scan that will tell it to always remove a space.

3

We tried that and it does not work. When you reconnect the scanner to
Shopify it applies Shopify’s settings to the scanner.