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Thermal or thermal transfer? USB or network? Get a handle on formats, carrier requirements, and the best models — and print labels automatically with Shipmondo.
When you’re packing a lot of orders, the A4 printer quickly becomes a slow colleague at the packing table. Every label has to be printed, folded, and slipped into a pocket or taped on, and those extra seconds quickly add up to many minutes over the course of a packing day. A dedicated label printer solves this: it prints a finished shipping label in seconds, with no ink and no manual in-between steps.
In this guide, we’ll go through the choices you need to make and how to get the printer working together with the rest of your packing flow in Shipmondo. If you’d like the basic explanation first, you can read what a label printer is in our glossary.
If you ship fewer packages, you don’t necessarily need a printer to get started. With selected carriers, you can ship labelless — that is, completely without printing a shipping label. Instead, a QR or numeric code is written directly on the package. Labelless shipments are also a great option when you want to offer your customers returns. Read more in our guide to labelless with dao and Bring.
Why a label printer is a good investment for your webshop
The math comes down to time per label. As a simplified example, let’s assume that you ship 300 orders a day, and each label on a regular printer costs 20 extra seconds in printing, folding, pocketing, and taping compared to applying a label with direct thermal printing. That adds up to around 100 minutes a day spent on handling labels alone. Over a week, that’s almost a full working day that could instead go toward picking more orders, sending more shipments, and growing your business.
On top of that, you save on the ongoing costs of ink and packing slip pockets, because a thermal printer burns the text directly into heat-sensitive paper without ribbons or ink cartridges. And the risk of errors drops, because the process becomes simpler without packing slip pockets, and missing ink won’t become a problem when the carrier needs to scan barcodes.
So a label printer doesn’t have to be relevant only at very high volume. What matters is how much manual handling you can remove from the packing table, whether you send 5 or 5,000 packages.
Thermal or thermal transfer printer?
There are two kinds of label printers: direct thermal and thermal transfer. The difference is simple. A direct thermal printer prints by heating heat-sensitive paper. There’s no ribbon, which makes operation cheap and maintenance minimal. A thermal transfer printer uses a ribbon that melts onto the label, giving a more durable print that withstands wear, heat, and light over a long time.
For shipping labels, direct thermal is the standard. A shipping label needs to last from the packing table to delivery, not for years, and direct thermal meets exactly that need at the lowest price per label. Thermal transfer is typically used for labels that need to last a long time, for example product labeling in the warehouse or labels exposed to harsh environments.
In short: if you’re choosing a label printer for shipping, direct thermal is almost always the right choice.
Formats and carrier requirements
The standard format for shipping labels through Shipmondo is 10x19 cm (102x192 mm). All labels across carriers that you buy through Shipmondo fit label paper in that format, so it’s important that your label printer supports this size.
We also offer a smaller, compact format for small shipments where the product allows it with selected carriers, for example dao.
Each carrier has its own requirements for the label: margins, spacing between elements, and a minimum barcode size. These requirements ensure that packages can be scanned automatically during sorting and aren’t missorted. Shipmondo generates the label correctly for each individual carrier, whether you ship with PostNord, GLS, dao, DHL, Danske Fragtmænd, or Bring. See the carriers you can ship with on our carrier page.
Where you place the label is just as important as the print itself. A mispositioned label can trigger extra fees from the carrier, so it pays to get it sitting right.
USB, network, or Bluetooth?
A label printer can be connected in several ways, and the choice depends on how many people need to print.
For a single fixed packing table, a USB connection is simple and stable. But if the printer needs to be shared between several computers or packing tables, a network printer wins. It isn’t tied to one machine, and everyone in the warehouse can send prints to it at the same time. This is also relevant if you want to print from digital devices such as handheld terminals, phones, or tablets as part of your workflow.
Bluetooth can also be relevant here if you don’t want to connect via a network.
If you have several packing tables, the printer shouldn’t be locked to one computer. With a network printer, multiple employees can send labels to the same printer and keep working from their own packing stations.
When you use the Shipmondo Print Client for Automatic Printing, you can add an unlimited number of printers from multiple computers and networks to your account and set up several packing stations. That way, you can handle many orders at once without the printer becoming the bottleneck as volume grows.
The most commonly used label printers for shipping labels
Needs vary a lot depending on how many orders you send. Here’s an overview by volume.
Starter: a compact desktop thermal printer is plenty. Zebra and Brother both make small models that take up little space in the office and are quick to get started with. This is also where a cheap label printer makes the most sense, because the need is still limited.
Growth: As volume rises, it pays to go for a network model so more people can print at the same time. A Zebra printer using the widely adopted ZPL format is a proven choice and prints quickly and reliably.
High volume: Here a robust network or industrial printer makes sense, built for many prints per hour day after day. Stability and speed matter most when the packing tables are running at full capacity.
A cheap label printer isn’t necessarily the cheapest solution. If you send few packages from one packing table, a simple desktop printer may be enough. But if volume grows, or if several employees need to share the printer, you should also look at capacity and network options. Otherwise, you risk choosing based on purchase price rather than your overall packing flow.
Zebra and Brother are among the most widely used brands for shipping labels, and Dymo is often used for smaller volumes. Whatever the brand, it’s essential that the printer supports the 10x19 cm format.
The Shipmondo Print Client supports most label printers, including models from Zebra, as well as regular A4 printers. This gives you plenty of flexibility to choose the printer solution that best fits your needs and the documents you need to print.
Automatic label printing: the printer is only half the story
The printer itself solves the speed at the packing table. But the real leap comes when printing happens automatically, so no one has to open a browser dialog and click print for every order.
With the Shipmondo Print Client, you can put printing on autopilot. Pick lists and pick path lists can be printed automatically as soon as an order comes in, and shipping labels and packing slips can be printed automatically once you’ve processed the order. The Print Client runs in the background, communicates with your Shipmondo account, and handles the work while you spend your time on something else. It’s easy to install and supports both Mac and Windows.
It works together with the rest of the flow. You can book freight and manage all your orders in one place in Shipmondo Order Management, and if you use Pick and pack, the right documents (such as pick lists, packing slips, shipping labels, and customs documents) are sent to the right printers. The fact that the entire process ties together is exactly why we develop all our solutions in-house: so they work together from the moment the order is placed to the printed label.
If you’d like to see the setup in detail, we have a step-by-step guide to the Shipmondo Print Client.
Check out our list of features to get started booking freight and printing your shipping labels automatically.
