The Best Label Printers for Small Businesses
As the owner of a small business you know that it's important to save time and money. This is why using barcode labels can be so beneficial. They give you the ability to track what your business sells via your stock management system. Barcodes come in different formats depending on the application. For example the barcodes on retail products tend to be EAN 13 or EAN8 where as a manufacturing company may use a QR code to track materials.
Whether pricing new product arrivals or labelling stock before dispatching an order, there is no better way to improve efficiency than incorporating quality barcode labels into your work flow.
Recommended label printers for barcode labels:
Is a barcode label printer worth investing in?
Having the right equipment is crucial to any successful business and being able to create good quality barcodes will yield a good return on investment. Barcode labels can help with visibility of stock on hand, pricing, and can help complete a sale at the till if they're connected with your sales or inventory management systems. The bar code label printers listed above are perfect for small businesses looking to keep their business organised from start-to-finish.
Having an inventory management system is key in tracking on-hand stocks and keeping product data accurate and upto date. Many small businesses use POS (Point Of Sale) Systems for this purpose. Some label printers offers both RFID encoding features as well as colour coding options allowing retailers more control over promotional prices (like discounts) or preventing theft by making products easier to identify when scanned through the ordering system.
Shipping Label Printers
With the growth of e-commerce, label printers for creating shipping labels are the very last part of the process that is often overlooked. Using a thermal label printer has a number of benefits. First of all, they are extremely economical – they are relatively cheap to buy, have very low maintenance costs and save money, especially if you are printing hundreds or thousands of shipping labels each month as direct thermal labels do not need any additional toner or ink.
Once set up, bulk printing of shipping labels is very simple. With thermal label printers a fast “first label out” time ensures that your orders can move through the pick/pack process quickly. The mechanical simplicity of the printers also means that there is less jamming of labels and minimal routine maintenance.
If you are just a small business, you probably won’t be printing thousands of shipping labels each month yet. So for most small businesses, a desktop label printer such as the Zebra GK420D will be more than adequate for their requirements. The only people who need really heavy label printing capabilities from their printers include industrial packaging companies and big box retailers with large warehouse inventories. These businesses typically have specialised label-printing equipment or at the very least industrial label printers.
What shipping label printer should I buy?
Generally most of the key label printer manufacturers make a printer that is capable of printing shipping labels. For most small businesses one of the following desktop label printers will suffice; however it is worth bearing in mind that if you intend to print labels from distribution platforms or apps or services then it may be worth investigating which best suits the platform you are using first.
Recommended Label Printers for Shipping Labels:
As you can see from reading this article, label printers have come a long way since their invention. Not only are they essential for any business that sells products online or in store, but most can now perform many more tasks than just printing barcodes.