Why Certified Zebra Supplies Are Best Choice for Your Zebra Printers

Printing barcode labels is critical for tracking inventory, assets and shipments, but it also costs money.

Your costs can easily add up when you’re printing hundreds or thousands of labels per day, per week, or per year. In fact, in just one year, companies typically spend three to 10 times more on their barcode printing supplies than they do on the original cost of their printers.

Many companies respond by buying cheaper supplies, thinking that this will save them money. But often it leads to the exact opposite.

The long-term costs of buying cheaper barcode printing supplies often far exceeds the short-term gain on your up-front costs. This is because cheaper supplies usually mean they’re lower in quality, and they’re made with inconsistent and substandard materials. In turn, this causes print quality issues, disruptions to labeling processes, and costly printhead replacements.

For example, cheap barcode labels with poor coating are often abrasive and grate on your printhead. This causes premature wear that requires replacements costing hundreds of dollars per printhead.

If you’re buying low-cost labels but need pre-printed colors on them, this is another problem. Often these labels are produced with substandard quality, causing pre-printed colors to transfer onto your printhead and cause print quality problems. Then you end up needing to reprint labels, costing you more time and money.

Lower quality labels are often too heat sensitive as well, and they require constant print darkness adjustments to compensate for printing problems and barcode scanning issues. More print darkness means you’ll be burning through your printing supplies faster.

Adhesives are frequently a problem with low-cost labels too, since they’re often produced with low-quality adhesives that may cause labels to fall off. In other cases, low-quality labels ooze adhesive into your printer because the label rolls are often wound too tight. This often causes printer jams or labels wrapping around the platen, plus adhesive oozing onto the label liner.

To add to these headaches, if you choose cheap labels and ribbons that aren’t properly designed and matched for the precise conditions of your labeling and scanning environment, you can end up with barcodes and label information fading, getting damaged, or rubbing away.

Each of these headaches adds up to lost time and money, particularly in labeling interruptions, servicing, repair, and replacement costs.

At Tri-State Business Systems, we recommend high-quality and certified Zebra printing supplies for all Zebra label printers.

Why Certified Zebra Printing Supplies Are Better

Zebra uses consistent materials and has ISO 9001:2008 certified processes in place to ensure the highest quality and print performance with all of its labels, ribbons and printing supplies. These quality processes include:

• Pre-testing on Zebra printers
• Assessment of printhead wear
• Verification of adhesive strength
• Pre-tests for environmental factors
• Testing for indoor/outdoor use and high/low temperatures
• Testing for resistance to abrasion, moisture and chemical exposure.

The end result is that you get barcode printing supplies with the right materials for each Zebra printer and application. You get the best possible printing, labeling and scanning results with minimal printhead wear and none of the problems of cheap, low-quality substitutes.

Best of all, if you own Zebra industrial or desktop printers and agree to use genuine Zebra supplies exclusively, Zebra will cover the cost of any printhead if it ever needs to be replaced. That alone could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars on your printing costs.

To learn more about Zebra supplies and request samples and pricing, contact Tri-State Business Systems at 908-359-8001 or email sales@tri-statebussys.com  for more information.

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