Quote:
Originally Posted by e2free
(Post 1087493)
Well I have no issue whatver you mentioned, its connected with click and drop within few monutes all labels ready, no ink usage no paper cost nothing at all, 500 orders are nothing for zebra pinter
You claming you do 500 to 1000 just think how much money you wasting just on ink and papers?
Plus which way you using to print orders? Click and drop or something else?
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Not a claim. We mostly do up to 500 of ours alone daily and we have a growing base of resellers who we drop ship for on a daily basis and that can sometimes get up to 1000 or more daily. It does not translate to large profits (
See a sample product), but that's not the point.
The point is: What's the best way to handle large volumes?
The truth is that it is a constantly moving goalpost depending on several factors revolving about your business.
There is no 'one size fits all' but here's something to look at as regards both methods in contention:
Using inkjet / A4 sticky labels
1. A4 paper works out at £70 per month (imported)
2. Ink works out about £6 per month on an eco tank (lasts two months)
3. Back up system £70
This works out to £980 per year.
Cons: Cost
Pros:
A. No expensive collector needed
B. Labels are loosely available for a team of people to work on concurrently - huge time saver!
C. Can do any size of labels to fit various postal pack/sizes.
D. Can customize labels without limitation of hardware or proprietary software driver
E. No rewinder or extremely expensive accessories needed.
F. Can have a cheap ready-to-go backup system for £70.
G. Speed of printing 4 labels per A4 page on inkjet = roughly same as Zebra, many times faster on a laser.
Speed of printing 8 PPI labels per A4 page on an inkjet printer = faster than Zebra.
12, 18 PPI labels per A4 Page on an inkjet printer will make a Zebra cry.
H. Collecting and applying labels to packs is a breeze and allows for a team to quickly finish a stack of labels
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Using a Zebra printer
1. Paper cost-free (only if you have Royal Mail Business Account) Low volume sellers will not have this option as they would not qualify for a royal mail business account. So they'd have to purchase their papers like the rest of us - which is far more expensive than the A4 counterpart.
2. Nothing to pay for ink.
Let's ignore any paper costs for now - this would work out to be £0 per year.
Let us also ignore any spares or back-up printer and assume nothing will break down even if you do 1000 per day for one year. You can see I'm being really fair here.
Pros:
0 costs
Labels can be customized
Cons:
Does not collect all labels in one place without an expensive collector and cutter.
Not very convenient to have a team of people work on a roll label rewound or not.
You're stuck with one label size.
Creates a mess doing volumes if you don't use a rewinder.
Extremely expensive accessories that should have been part of the printer.
Ready to go backup system ~£300
Does not easily allow for multiple people to work on a print job without collision and a gross waste of time EVERY DAY.
The lack of flexibility in printing various labels, the monumental waste of time in collating labels on a daily basis especially for large volumes - when computed into one full year turns out to be far more than £1000 in loses. So we are happy to offset that with £980.
We did not even have to factors in accessories, spares and back-up to reach this decision. Perhaps things will change in the future, but for now - this works for us.
If folks can pay £156 per month to manage 4 accounts with ReplyManger just to save time, then £82 per month to save more time, have a fully functional back-up and a streamlined process that allows for teamwork is easily justified.
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We have an OBA account which we use for PPI and the OBA account is connected to Click and Drop where we print 6x4 labels too.
We don't connect any of our shops to click and drop for many reasons
see this post
What we do is download and merge all CSV files in excel, correct errors like postcodes spacing & capitalization, full-text formatting, catching errors like missing door numbers, etc.
All these take place in seconds as they're excel-based.
This file is then uploaded to click and drop to process the labels.
If we're going to use PPI for the day, we just use MSWord Mail Merge to process the CSVs and OBA to create the manifest directly instead of Click and Drop.
In short, if you supply me an eBay CSV with a thousand details (phake of course) including the regular customer errors of lower case names, missing door numbers, lower case or merged postcodes, etc. I'd be happy to provide you fully formatted, ready to print job in a record time of 5 minutes.
See this:
