Refilling and maintaining your pricing gun: sticker rolls, ink rolls, and crooked prints
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by Verpakkingdeals.nl
6 min reading time
A price gun that prints faintly is almost never broken. This is how you maintain it: ink rollers, label rolls, the four most common malfunctions, and how much you need per year.
You've got two hundred items in front of you that need pricing. The first fifty stickers look fine, then the print gets lighter, and by one hundred, only half a price is visible. You squeeze harder, that helps for a bit, and then it goes back to being faint. It's not the pricing gun that's broken - the ink roller is empty.
A pricing gun is one of the few pieces of equipment in a store that you buy and then never look at again. Until it stops working, usually right when a delivery has arrived and the shelf is empty. This article is about maintaining it: what consumables it uses, how much you need, and what to do about the four most common problems.
What's in a pricing gun set — and what to buy separately
A pricing gun relies on three things: the gun itself, a roll of self-adhesive price stickers, and an ink roller. The gun lasts for years. The other two are consumables, and that's precisely where things go wrong: people buy a set once and assume that's it.
A starter set usually includes all three. In our pricing guns and labels section, for example, you'll find the MX-5500 Red Pricing Gun with 5500 stickers and 2 ink rollers for €24.95. The same setup applies to the yellow and blue versions, both with 5500 stickers and 3 ink rollers, also €24.95. The color of the gun doesn't affect its function; it's useful if you work with multiple people and each wants to recognize their own gun.
Almost every "the gun isn't working anymore" turns out to be an empty or dried-out ink roller. Two things to know:
Empty is empty, but drying out happens sooner. An ink roller left unused in a drawer for months will dry out. The print then becomes grayish even if there's still ink in it.
Squeezing harder doesn't help. It pushes the numbers deeper into the sticker, causing the paper to tear sooner. It doesn't make the print darker.
Loose rollers are cheap: the refillable ink roller for MX-5500 and V-5500, 20 mm costs €2.95. Keep two in reserve next to the gun, not in a drawer on the other side of the store. A reserve roll you have to search for is not a reserve roll.
Sticker rolls: how many do you need?
Calculate it once, and you won't have to think about it for a year. Count how many items you price per week, multiply by 52, and add ten percent for misprints and re-stickering.
Items per week
Per year (+10%)
Suitable purchase
50
approx. 2,900
5000 pieces (€9.95)
150
approx. 8,600
2 × 5000 pieces
500
approx. 28,600
Starter set with 50,000 pieces (€59.95)
Loose refills can be bought as white price stickers for pricing gun MX-5500, 5000 pieces for €9.95. That works out to about two-tenths of a cent per sticker — the cheapest part of your entire shop fitting, and yet the part you most often get stuck on because it's just run out.
Using color for promotions
Those who regularly mark down prices will find the price stickers in 6 colors, 500 pieces (€2.95) useful. Internally agree on one meaning per color – for example, yellow for discounted, red for last items – and stick to it all year round. Colors that change meaning per promotion only cause confusion at the checkout.
Please note that a discounted sticker over the old price is different from communicating a "was-now" price. What you are allowed to say about it is subject to rules; leave the old price if you mention it, and don't just stick a new sticker over a price that never existed.
Four malfunctions and what to do about them
The print is crooked or partial. Usually, the sticker roll is not running straight through the guide. Remove the roll, unroll half a meter, and reinsert it, with the paper taut.
Two stickers come out at once. Often, the backing paper is torn or creased somewhere. Cut out the damaged part and start over.
The sticker detaches from the item. Self-adhesive material adheres poorly to dusty, greasy, cold, or ribbed surfaces. Price on the packaging, not on the product, and wipe the area clean first.
The stickers tear during printing. Squeezing too hard or an old roll. First, try a new ink roller; nine out of ten times, you unconsciously squeeze harder because the print is too light.
Storage: what glue and ink are sensitive to
Self-adhesive material and ink do not like heat or moisture. A roll of stickers on a windowsill above a radiator will degrade within a season: the adhesive becomes tough, and the roll sticks to itself. A roll in a damp shed, however, will detach.
Store rolls flat or upright in a closed box, at room temperature, out of direct sunlight. If you buy a large batch at once, keep one roll in use and leave the rest unopened. The same applies to security seal stickers VOID, 60 pieces (€9.95), which you use to check if a box or display cabinet has been opened during transit — these also have glue that dries out.
What it costs you per year
A store that prices 150 items per week will use approximately two rolls of 5000 stickers and three to four ink rollers per year. That's roughly €20 for stickers and €12 for ink, plus the one-time cost of the gun. Budget that €32 as a fixed annual expense and order once a year, instead of making urgent orders three times a year.
If you do order separately, take a look at the advantage packs for webshops — these contain the same consumables in larger quantities.
Reordering
All guns, sticker rolls, and ink rollers are grouped together under Pricing Guns & Labels. If you also need tape, seals, or labeling material for your counter and warehouse, check out Stickers & Tapes. If you're unsure which refill fits your gun, or want to know the cost of a year's supply for your store, email your question to info@verpakkingdeals.nl and we'll calculate it for you.
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