I started my business about 1.5 months ago. I’ve made a few sales maybe like around 50-100. I sell on Etsy, tiktok shop, Facebook market place BUT I hand write my labels. I can’t really afford a label printer right now and I’m afraid it makes me look unprofessional. I see all the other sells with printers but me? Handwritten… anyone else does this?
You can’t really hand write shipping labels. Are you hand drawing the barcode too?
Even if you can’t afford a label printer right now, you can use a regular printer + some tape just fine
So what I do is I write like the addresses and then I bring it to USPS. But I don’t have a printer either unfortunately😅
Use Pirate ship and get a thermal printer. I got mine for 40 bucks. It also gives me a discount on shipping. That few extra bucks saved on shipping per order pays for the printer and labels each shipment. And thermal printers use no ink, so no extra costs down the road.
You can print labels on a regular ink jet printer if you have one… maybe you already knew this though.
Yeah Ik that but I unfortunately don’t own one either. But thanks for the reply!
What labels are you talking about? For what is worth, as long as they look clean and nicely done, it wouldn’t bother me as a customer.
We used the clear matte Avery labels, and had them printed at Staples. Their laser printers were superior to my home inkjet. Designed them on Canva. Eventually graduated to preprinted packaging from China. I recommend this as we tried many things.
Goodwill has printers for like $10 fyi. Best luck to you.
If you are weighing the cost of buy in for shipping labels and over all cost of shipping, don’t forget to include your gas mileage, time you spend hand writing things and time spent driving (your time value of money). It might be something that actually saves you money when you take into account all of your incidental costs.
Maybe you’ve already done that, and if so, and your current process is saving you money, the next question to ask is “Is this scaleable?” If you double your demand, does this process still work for you? What about triple? At some point there will be a plateau where you will cap the growth of your business if you aren’t managing shipping differently. Find out where that plateau falls, and if it isn’t right now, start planning ahead for when it comes in the future so you’ll be able to make the switch when it’s time. UPS makes it very easy to ship from your home for a monthly fee, just as an example.