If you print postage through Royal Mail's Click & Drop portal, you've probably hit at least one of these: a label that prints completely blank, a barcode that gets sliced in half, text that shrinks to fit a page that's the wrong size, or a printer that just sits there doing nothing when you hit "print." None of these are really Royal Mail bugs — they're almost always a mismatch between what Click & Drop expects and what your printer or paper is set up to do. Here's how to work through them.
The label prints blank, or almost blank
This is the most common complaint, and it's nearly always one of two things. First: direct thermal labels have a shelf life and a "print side." If a roll has been stored somewhere warm or humid, or it's loaded with the coated side facing the wrong way, the printhead will fire correctly but nothing will show up on the paper. Flip the roll and try a test print before assuming the printer itself is faulty — our storage guide covers how to avoid this in the first place.
Second, and more common with new printer setups: Click & Drop is sending the label as a PDF to a driver that's configured for plain paper rather than direct thermal mode. Most Zebra, Citizen, TSC and Brother thermal printers have a driver-level "media type" or "print method" setting — if it's set to "thermal transfer" with no ribbon installed, you'll get nothing on the page even though the printer runs fine. Check your printer driver's media settings match direct thermal, not transfer. If you're not sure which type of label you're using, our guide to direct thermal vs thermal transfer labels explains the difference and how to tell them apart.
The barcode or QR code gets cut off
Click & Drop generates labels at a fixed 4×6" (100 × 150mm) page size. If your printer driver is set to a different label size — a common default is 4×4" or a generic "letter" page — the system will scale or crop the label to fit, and the first thing to go is usually the bottom of the barcode or the tracking QR code. This is the single biggest cause of "my scanner won't read this label" complaints from couriers, and it's worth reading alongside our guide on barcode scanning failures generally.
The fix is almost always in the driver's page setup rather than in Click & Drop itself: confirm the label stock size in your printer driver matches the physical labels loaded (100 × 150mm), and confirm Click & Drop's print dialog isn't set to "fit to page" or "shrink oversized pages," which can rescale a correctly-sized label onto an incorrectly-sized page profile. See our full breakdown of why 4×6 became the standard shipping label size for more on why couriers are so strict about this dimension.
Printing is slow, or the printer stalls mid-batch
If you're printing manifests of 20, 50 or 100+ labels in one Click & Drop batch, USB printers on an older driver can sometimes buffer badly and drop connection partway through. This shows up as the first handful of labels printing fine and then the job silently stopping. Two things help here: printing in smaller batches (10–20 at a time) if you're on USB rather than network/Wi-Fi connection, and making sure your printer driver is current — Zebra, Citizen, TSC and Brother all release driver updates that specifically address batch-printing stability. See our fuller guide to printer driver mistakes that ruin batch printing if stalling keeps happening on a printer that's otherwise healthy.
Print quality is faded, streaky, or has a white line down the label
This one is rarely a Click & Drop issue at all — it's the printhead or the label stock. A single unbroken white line running the length of every label almost always means a speck of dust or adhesive residue is sitting on the printhead; a soft isopropyl-alcohol cleaning swab (sold for exactly this purpose) usually clears it in seconds. General fading across the whole label, rather than a single line, more often points to labels that have degraded from heat exposure, or a printer heat/darkness setting that's too low for the batch of paper you're using — direct thermal label stock does vary slightly between manufacturers, and a setting tuned for one roll may run light on another.
"Printer not found" or the print job never reaches the printer
Click & Drop prints through your browser or a small print agent depending on which version you're using. If jobs vanish silently, check that the correct printer is selected as default in your operating system (not just in the browser's print dialog), and that any print agent/connector software Click & Drop installed is actually running — it's common for this to get closed accidentally or blocked from starting on login after a Windows update.
Getting print quality right consistently
A lot of these issues trace back to inconsistent label stock — rolls that vary in thickness, coating quality or core size from batch to batch, which forces you to keep re-tuning printer settings. Using a single consistent 100 × 150mm direct thermal roll, sized correctly for your printer's core, removes most of the guesswork. If cost is part of what's pushing you toward cheaper, less consistent stock, it's worth reading 5 ways to cut shipping label costs — there are cheaper routes than switching to unreliable paper.
Looking for reliable 4×6 direct thermal labels?
Our rolls are 100 × 150mm, 500 labels per roll, tested against Zebra, Citizen, TSC and Brother printers — the same specification Click & Drop expects by default.
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