The most common and most expensive mistake in this category is buying a receipt printer when you needed a label printer, or the reverse. They look similar, they are both thermal, and they do completely different jobs.
Label printer or receipt printer?
| Receipt printer | Label printer | |
|---|---|---|
| Prints onto | A continuous paper roll | Adhesive labels |
| Used for | Customer receipts | Barcodes, price and shipping labels |
| Lives | At the till | In the stockroom or packing area |
| Typical price | GH₵900 – 1,600 | GH₵1,400 – 2,000 |
If you want to hand a customer proof of purchase, you want a receipt printer. If you want to stick a scannable barcode onto a product, you want a label printer.
When a shop actually needs one
You need a label printer when you sell things that arrive without a barcode:
- Goods you repackage from bulk into retail quantities
- Produce, meat, spices — anything sold loose or weighed
- Your own manufactured or branded products
- Items whose printed barcode is damaged or unreadable
Print a label, stick it on, and that product behaves like any other scannable item for the rest of its life in your shop. Without one, those items get typed in by hand at the till every single time — which is slow, and which is where stock counts quietly go wrong.
It also prints shipping labels
The same machine prints address and delivery labels. For any business sending orders out, that removes handwriting from the process and makes parcels look like they came from a real company.
What the specifications mean
Our Xprinter XP-470B prints up to 108mm wide at 203 dpi, at up to 127mm per second, on media from 20mm to 112mm. In practice that means:
- 108mm width — wide enough for a standard shipping label, not just a small price tag
- 203 dpi — the normal resolution for barcodes; scanners read them reliably
- Direct thermal — no ink, no ribbon, only label rolls
- USB and LAN — it can sit away from the till and be shared between machines
Pricing a whole counter rather than one machine? Start with the POS machine price guide.
Close the loop
A label printer is only half of it. Print the barcode here, scan it at the till with a 2D barcode scanner, and SellarPro tracks that item's stock automatically from then on — including during stock counts, where you scan the shelf instead of typing product names.
Browse by category: printers · barcode scanners · POS machines