A mag­net­ic stripe card is a card embed­ded with mag­net­ic tech­nol­o­gy that allows per­son­al infor­ma­tion to be read when swept through a card read­er. Mag­net­ic stripe cards are used to store data for ID card pro­grams in a wide range of indus­tries includ­ing edu­ca­tion, health­care, hos­pi­tal­i­ty, con­struc­tion, busi­ness, retail, and many more.

There are two types of mga­net­ic stripes: High Coer­civ­i­ty, or “HiCo” and Low Coer­civ­i­ty, also known as “LoCo”. Both cards can store the same amount of data. HiCo stripe with 2750OE means that it requires a stronger mag­net­ic field to write data onto the stripe. It’s rec­om­mend­ed for most appli­ca­tions such as loy­al­ty cards, mem­ber­ship cards, or gift cards. The LoCo stripe, on the oth­er hand, has a low­er coer­civ­i­ty of 300OE. They are cheap­er than HiCo so it’s per­fect for one-time usage like event pass­es or hotel key cards where the card isn’t used often.

There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent widths of mag­net­ic stripes: 12.7mm and 8.4mm are the more com­mon that we offer. We can deter­mine this, sim­ply by mea­sur­ing the magstripe with a ruler.
1) 12.7mm — This is our most com­mon magstripe size. It con­tains 3 tracks to be encod­ed.
2) 8.4mm — This is a 2 track mag stripe, track 1 and 2 only. Track 3 is rarely used, so if you need a larg­er print area on the card, the 5/16″ magstripe is a good choice.

Nor­mal mag­net­ic stripe con­tains 3 tracks to be encod­ed. You can encode 1–3 tracks, although track 3 is very rarely used. This means you can encode more than one track. Typ­i­cal­ly if 2 tracks are encod­ed they are encod­ed with the same infor­ma­tion. Below are the specs for each track.
Track 1: 79 char­ac­ters (alphanu­mer­ic) 7 bit = 210 bit /in. — Encod­ing starts with % (per­cent sign) and ends with ? (ques­tion mark), the com­mon field sep­a­ra­tor is ^
Track 2: 40 char­ac­ters (numer­ic only) 5 bit = 75 bits /in. — Encod­ing starts with ; (semi-colon) and ends with ? (ques­tion mark), the com­mon field sep­a­ra­tor is =
Track 3: 107 char­ac­ters (numer­ic only) 5 bits = 210 bits /in. Encod­ing starts with + (plus sign) and ends with ? (ques­tion mark), the com­mon field sep­a­ra­tor is =

The stan­dard mag­net­ic stripe is black. We can also make col­or mag­net­ic stripe, such as gold, sil­ver, red, blue, green, brown etc. You can choose col­or mag­net­ic stripe to make your cards more spe­cial.