Being an online seller is not as easy as is might look at first. You have to think about many different things – your customer, shipping carrier, stock-levels, etc. Not to mention that, if you already found your shipping carrier, you still need to figure out how to print labels. Decide whether you are capable of working with your home printer or if it will be additional costs. You need to understand the main differences between a simple inkjet printer and other printing options. To facilitate your decision, we narrowed down all the available information into this article. Here you will find the best printers to print shipping labels for online orders.
Types of shipping label printers
As mentioned before, the inkjet shipping label printer, which most likely you already have at home could possibly print shipping labels. Also, a laser shipping label printer could be suitable for this task. On the other hand, there is a thermal shipping label printer option, which is the most expensive of all of them. Because all these three options are perfectly suitable for printing labels, we will discuss each one of them.
Inkjet Shipping label printers
Inkjet printers are the standard option in most homes and offices. This could be really really handy, if you are starting an online business, because that means no additional costs. The main thing is that this option is right only if you do not have many orders. In other words, choose these printers to print shipping labels only if you have a few of them per day.
Inkjet printers Pros:
- Works without warming-up
- Lowest start-up cost
- Tend to be small and light
Inkjet printers Cons:
- Expensive Ink
- Low capacity paper trays
- Slow printing
- Expensive cost per bigger amount of labels
Laser Shipping Label printers
It is also possible for laser printers to print shipping labels, which is much faster than working with an inkjet printer. Of course, if you print just a few labels a day, you won’t notice a big difference, but bigger businesses will feel a slight difference. Although their upfront cost is a bit more expensive, the larger amount of printed labels is cheaper.
Laser printers Pros:
- Better handling of small fonts and lines
- Prints faster than inkjet printers
- Print more labels for the same price
Laser printers Cons :
- Need time to warm-up
- Usually bigger and heavier than inkjet printers
- Lower variety of printing materials
- Expensive toner refills
Thermal Shipping label printers
The best option for multichannel order fulfilment. Thermal printers can print shipping labels on a roll, which allows printing without limits. Also, it is really fast and does not require expensive ink or toner. However, they are biggest investment, but is the best option for a steady business flow.
Thermal printers Pros :
- Fast. Can print one shipping label in about one second
- No ink or toner
- Allows printing of a large amount of labels at a time (up to 2000)
Thermal printers Cons
- High start-up price
Best printers to print shipping labels
As we discussed the best option depends on your business size. For small online stores, which have just a few orders per day, there is no necessity to buy expensive thermal printers. On the other hand, according to ink and toner prices, thermal printers will always pay off. Besides that, here are some samples of the best thermal printers to print shipping labels:
- DYMO LabelWriter 450 Turbo Thermal Label Printer
- Brother QL-700 Desktop use Label Maker
- DYMO Label Writer 450 Twin Turbo label printer
- ROLLO Commercial Grade Direct Thermal High-Speed Shipping Label Printer (X1036)
- Brother QL710W Label Printer with Wireless Networking
How to get printed labels for all shipping carriers?
As soon as you decide which are the best printers to print shipping labels, you should find a way to work with all shipping carriers at once. The way to do is with third-party software. Multiorders is a shipping management software, which has integrations with all shipping carriers and all sales channels. You can fulfil any order four times faster, by simply clicking on the chosen shipping carrier’s logo. Multiorders creates a single order management system, which auto-syncs all data for your orders. Also, automatically mark your order as dispatched on all platforms with tracking numbers. Because of shipping integrations, the system automatically adds tracking information to each marketplace and additionally informs your customer.
Multiorders:
- Inventory management
- Tracking numbers & printed labels
- Single dashboard
