How to print Penny Black inserts

A high-level overview of the types of printers used, packing processes supported and ways of triggering prints with Penny Black

Inserts are printed on desktop printers in your warehouse. Penny Black is designed to be flexible, allowing you to print in different ways to suit your warehouse and packing setup.

We have pre-built integrations for many common WMS platforms and simple APIs for implementing your own if necessary. You can let Penny Black hardware (our Satellites) take care of the print management, or you can download the raw PDFs and take responsibility for printing yourself.

Printers

We recommend the following Epson inkjet printers:  

These printers are all eco-friendly, consuming a fraction of the power required for laser printers (about 1%), with recyclable waste and ink cartridges. The Workforce Pro printers are low-cost per unit and small enough to sit on a packing bench or in various locations around your warehouse.

They all print quickly - between 7 and 12 seconds per print in most cases.

Packing process

You can print to fit in with different packing processes, which will require either batch or single printing.

Single printing is the most common scenario with packing benches processing orders individually. As orders are processed one by one, the insert is printed in real time to be inserted into the box before moving on to the next order.

For batch printing, you will have a small number of printers (often just one) that print all of your inserts in advance. These inserts then need to be reconciled against shipping labels to be put into the correct box for the customer. This is commonly used for subscription brands or those with limited SKUs where you get a lot of the same order. 

See more details on the packing process options.

Triggering the print

We commonly provide Penny Black "Satellites" which are micro PCs sitting in your warehouse and orchestrating the printing for each printer. These devices are waiting for a trigger to print, which must be provided by your WMS.

However, it's also possible to take responsibility for printing yourself without our hardware by simply downloading the PDFs from our platform when you need them.

Either way, your WMS needs to request a print or file via our API at the earliest possible opportunity to deliver seamless printing as part of your packing process. For a deeper dive into this process see Printing Proces Overview.

We have a number of pre-built WMS integrations that you can use, or in some cases, we can implement one for you. For custom or proprietary WMSs you will need to build your own integration, for which we have comprehensive guides available.