Digital business cards

They are two halves of the same thing, and the difference is what the QR code points at. A QR code on a paper business card is just a code printed on card stock, and it can encode anything, and most encode a contact card or a website. A digital business card is the page itself: your name, title, company, photo, contact rows and links, living at its own web address that you can edit whenever you like. On ScanMe the two work together. You build the card, and the card gets a QR code that opens it. Print that code and the paper becomes a doorway to a page you still control, rather than a snapshot of your details on the day it went to the printer.

Business Cards

Their camera opens a short ScanMe link, which immediately redirects to your card page. There is no app to install and nothing to sign in to: it is an ordinary web page, so it opens in whatever browser their phone already uses. The page is rendered on our server and ships no JavaScript at all, which is why it appears almost instantly even on a poor connection at a conference. From there they can tap to call or email you, open any link you added, or save your details straight to their contacts.

No, and this is the main reason to use one. The QR code printed on your card encodes a permanent short link, never your details and never your card’s web address. Editing your title, number, photo or links changes the page that link resolves to, so every card you have ever handed out shows the new version the next time it is scanned. Even changing your card’s personalized link leaves printed codes working, because the printed code was never pointing at that address in the first place. Nothing needs reprinting, and there is nothing to update on the cards themselves.

Yes. Every card page has a save-contact button that downloads a standard vCard file, which is the format both iPhone and Android use for contacts. Tapping it opens the add-contact screen with your name, title, company, phone, email, address and website already filled in, so nobody has to retype anything or read your handwriting. It is a plain file download rather than anything proprietary, so it also works from a laptop and imports into Outlook, Google Contacts and every other address book that understands vCard.

Yes, if you switch on the contact form for that card. A visitor can send you their name, email, phone, company, job title and a short message, and they have to check a consent box before it will send, and the form records whether they agreed. Those entries appear on your Contacts page, where you can mark each one as new, in progress or dealt with, and add a private note only you can read. Nobody else can see them: they belong to the card’s workspace, which is yours. If you would rather not collect anything, leave the form off and the card simply does not show it.

Card contacts

No. Printing is one way to hand the card over, not a requirement. Your card has an ordinary web address you can put in an email signature, a chat message, a social profile or a video-call background. You can also show the QR code on your phone screen and let someone scan it directly off the glass, which is how most people use it day to day. Printing matters when you want something physical to leave behind — and that is exactly the case where a code pointing at a page you can edit is worth more than one with your details frozen inside it.

You pick one of six designs (Professional, Minimal, Modern, Executive, Dark and Creator) and then change its colors to your own. You can add a profile photo, a company logo and a cover banner, and crop each of them in the editor; re-cropping always starts from the picture you originally uploaded, so adjusting one twice does not degrade it. You can also add a YouTube video, which Creator shows as the banner at the top and every other design shows in its own section further down. The QR code for the card has the full design engine behind it too, so its dots, eyes, colors, frame and logo can match your brand.

It counts what happened, not who did it. Each card has an analytics page showing views, how many people saved your contact details, how many sent you theirs, and which links were tapped. No IP address is ever stored: a visitor is recorded as a salted hash that is regenerated every day, so the same phone opening your card on Monday and Tuesday cannot be connected across the two. What is kept alongside it is coarse and non-identifying — a two-letter country, a device type and a browser name. Nothing here identifies an individual, and there is no cross-site tracking of any kind.

You have two options and they are deliberately different. Pausing is reversible: the card stops showing and anyone scanning it sees a short notice, and you can switch it back on whenever you want, which is useful between jobs or while you rework it. Retiring is permanent: the card cannot be published, paused or edited again, and every printed code pointing at it stops resolving for good. Retiring is the right answer when details should genuinely stop circulating, and because it cannot be undone the app asks you to confirm before it happens. If you only want to change something, edit the card instead — that never needs a reprint.

Use a plain contact QR code when the details will never change and you want it to work with no internet at all: the vCard is encoded inside the symbol itself, so a phone can read it in a basement with no signal. Use a digital business card when the details might change, when you want more than a contact record can hold — a photo, links, a video, a contact form — or when you want to know whether anyone is scanning it. The trade-off is straightforward: the contact code is self-contained and permanent, and the card is editable and measurable but needs a connection to open.

Contact QR generator