Every courier label tool, including Royal Mail Click & Drop, will happily generate a PDF you can print on an ordinary inkjet or laser printer using adhesive sheet labels or plain paper taped to the parcel. It works. Whether it's a good idea depends entirely on how many parcels you're sending.
The inkjet/laser route
Print the courier's label PDF onto A4 adhesive label sheets (usually one 4×6 label per sheet, with waste around it) or plain paper, then trim and tape it to the parcel. This requires no special hardware beyond a printer you likely already own, which makes it the obvious starting point for anyone shipping a handful of parcels a week.
Where the real cost is
Per label, inkjet or laser printing is usually more expensive than direct thermal once you account for ink or toner cartridges, adhesive label sheet cost, and wasted sheet material around a label that only needs a fraction of an A4 page. At low volume this difference is trivial. At a few hundred labels a month, it adds up to a meaningfully higher cost per label than a direct thermal roll — see the numbers in our cost-cutting guide.
The time cost nobody accounts for
Beyond raw cost, the process itself is slower: loading single sheets rather than a continuous roll, trimming labels to size, and taping them down all add seconds per parcel that a thermal printer's peel-and-stick roll skips entirely. At 10 parcels a day that's a rounding error; at 100 a day it's a real chunk of dispatch time.
When it's genuinely fine to skip a thermal printer
If you're shipping occasionally — a handful of parcels a week, or you're just starting a side business and volume is unpredictable — there's no strong case for buying dedicated hardware yet. The inkjet/laser route is a perfectly reasonable starting point, and it lets you defer the decision until your volume actually justifies it.
When to upgrade
The tipping point is usually somewhere around 20–30 labels a week, where the cumulative time and material cost of the workaround starts to outweigh the price of an entry-level thermal printer. At that point it's worth reading our thermal printer buying guide or, for a cost-focused comparison, our breakdown of running costs across the major brands.
When you're ready to upgrade
Our direct thermal rolls drop straight into any Zebra, Citizen, TSC or Brother printer — no ink, toner or adhesive sheets required.
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