Swipe card systems

[Lory]

Can anyone offer any insight into 'membership cards - swipe or barcode systems'?

Are there any that come as a package, with database software included?

Or do you have make your own programme?

How easy are they to set up?

Any info gratefully received

[Filthy Monkey]

Ceroc use them. Give Mike a call, he might point you in the right direction...

[David Bailey]

Can anyone offer any insight into 'membership cards - swipe or barcode systems'?

Are there any that come as a package, with database software included?

Or do you have make your own programme?

How easy are they to set up?

Any info gratefully received

I think the cards themselves are fairly straightforward - eg here - but the systems behind them may take a bit of work, depending on how high-tech you want to make it.

Hmmmm.... you'd probably need to look at the legal stuff also - Data Protection, privacy policy, that sort of thing.

[Trousers]

Why do you need them? Really?

[David Bailey]

I'm guessing it's for this:
http://www.wcs-london.com/

[Lory]

I think the cards themselves are fairly straightforward - eg here -

Thanks, I just spoke to them and they were very helpful Quite expensive for the initial set up though.

Why do you need them? Really?

For what David said below but we're just playing with idea's at this stage really

I'm guessing it's for this:
http://www.wcs-london.com/

[David Bailey]

Well you could just get a set of generic cards for now, and record membership details separately - given the likely numbers it's probably not worth any major investment.

Andy McG may have some advice? In fact, what does Catriona do?

I think it's a good idea, actually - good marketing and so on.

[Dreadful Scathe]

Its easy enough to find lots of companies that will sell you impressive looking membership cards - start with google and shop around.

Cost wise - it'll be cheaper to have a professional looking card with a unique number on it, the only overhead is the time for typing it in to keep a record of people (and the chance of a mistype because humans are basically rubbish). Swipe cards are foolproof from a data point of view but require extra equipment to read, as do barcodes. It is possible to see just how much time is involved by doing your own limited user testing. I would say that a good professional image is likely one of your main reasons for getting nice cards but people are impressed by the general quality of the card more than if it swipes or not.

As for databases, add quite a bit more for a out of the box solution to integrate with a swipe card machine or bar code scanner (and again, shop around to compare).

I'd suggest you simply get your own portable database (it won't be very complicated at first) - i suggest XAMPP on a portable flash drive. You can then consider a swipe machine/scanner and look into software to read the data from the card (this sort of thing).

The cheapest, and least technical, option is clearly the unique number idea with human input and a portable database.