Running a small business is all about making little decisions that impact the future in big ways. When you’re just starting out, finding the right employees can require an agonizingly long interview process. When you’re setting up your point of sale system, choosing between traditional and mobile is a huge choice. Picking which card reader you’re going to go with can take weeks. You don’t want to pick the wrong thing, and you definitely can’t afford to just clutter your business up with things that you can’t use. Once you’ve settled on a mobile point of sale system you might find yourself asking if you even really need to have a printer anymore. You have the ability to email your receipts, so do you really need a printer? You’re concerned about time and expense. The answer is that you shouldn’t skip out on the printer just yet. Maybe in five years you won’t need one, but to succeed as a business now, a small, fast thermal printer to churn out labels and receipts will go a long way towards keeping your company clear. Here are the perks of having a thermal printer in your business arsenal.
Speed
Speed is the single most important factor in wowing your clients, and the single biggest factor in favor of using a mobile point of sale system, according to Food Service Warehouse. If you’re saving time with your POS, you don’t want to lose that time with your printer. A thermal printer makes things print much faster than an ink jet printer because you’re not factoring in any drying time. The heat applied to the printer paper makes it change colors, that color serves instead of ink, and once the printer is out in the cool air it becomes very hard to mess that image up. Plus, you don’t have to wait for the ink to either soak in or set. Once the process has been completed, that’s it. You can’t take it back or do it over, but you also don’t have to worry about messing it up if you yank that out of the printer.
Clarity
Because the speed is so great and there is no ink spraying everywhere, the clarity of the image is much more precise. When you’re printing with ink you have to account for the bleed of the paper. How much will the ink soak in and feather out? With thermal printing, that isn’t a factor. The heat will quickly dissipate in the paper and you’re left with a crisp, clean image every time. This is a great thing if you want to use your receipt printer to handle other tasks, like adding some QR codes to select merchandise as part of a marketing campaign. QR codes need to be extremely precise; as anything that blurs them will change the amount of information they store and can render them unusable. A thermal printer’s crisp lines makes it better for multiple purposes in a business setting.
Durability of Image
Thermal printing is great for the kinds of printing you want to be permanent. It’s one thing for a tracking label to fade, warp, or smear after some time, but a thermal printed label is much better for long term use as a receipt or tag on an item as they are very durable, according to Barcode Warehouse. This means that you can print something once and expect it to last, which is always a perk when you’re trying to increase efficiency in a business setting. Ink is easy to mess up in a number of ways. If your ink is exposed to moister, it might run or bleed, which is not a problem with thermal treated paper. It could also be smeared while it’s being printed or if it’s handled too soon directly afterwards. Basically the only way to ruin an image on a thermal paper is to get the paper hot enough to change color again. This is not a very easy thing to do; finding something controlled enough to alter the paper without setting it on fire is a difficult process. There’s no reason to think that this will happen unless your every day paper needs include holding them above a bunch of candles.
Reliability of Machine
Thermal printers–like the ones offered by eCommerce vendor Shopify–are the best in the business if you want to have something simple to work with, according to Street Directory. They don’t have as many moving parts as other printers, which means that they don’t have as much potential to go wrong. When everything is simple inside it’s also easier to fix if something does go wrong. Inkjet printers have dozens of moving parts, as anyone who’s ever tried to fix one can tell you. This means that you can count on a thermal printer to be there for you when you need it most.
