When Shopify's Retail Barcode Labels app is not enough

Shopify’s Retail Barcode Labels app is free, made by Shopify, and better than its reputation. Plenty of shops will never need anything else.

It is also built around one idea that decides everything about when it stops being enough: it prints from your product list.

What that means in practice

You open the app, choose products, choose a template, set a quantity, print. Everything starts from the catalogue.

That is exactly right when the job starts from the catalogue. A new range lands and you want labels for the fourteen products in it. A shelf edge needs relabelling after a price change. You are labelling a known list of things, and a known list is what the app takes.

It is the wrong shape when the job starts from a delivery. Nothing in it knows a purchase order exists, so it cannot know that eleven of one variant arrived this morning. You work that out and type it in.

Where the line is

Not the size of your catalogue. How often you receive.

Label by product a few times a year and the counting is trivial, because you are labelling a list you already have. Label every delivery and the counting is the job: open the receiving record, read the accepted quantity per line, find each product in the label app, type the number, repeat.

On a delivery with thirty variants that is most of a morning, and it comes back every week. The printing was never the slow part.

There is a second cost that only shows up later. Because nothing records what you printed, a delivery arriving in two drops is counted twice by hand, and part deliveries are where duplicate labels come from.

What the reviews say

The app is rated 2.3 from 466 reviews, which is the lowest score of any app in this category and the largest number of reviews. Both halves of that are worth reading properly.

A free app that ships with the platform gets reviewed by everyone who tries it, including everyone who tried it for a job it was never built for. A paid app with 85 reviews has been chosen by 85 people who wanted that specific thing. The scores are not measuring the same population.

What the score does tell you is that a lot of people arrive at this app expecting it to do something it does not do. That expectation is reasonable. It is Shopify’s own app, it is called Retail Barcode Labels, and the labels you most often need are for stock that just arrived.

The honest test

Time yourself on one delivery. Work out the label quantities as you normally would, but with a stopwatch running, and stop it when you press print.

Multiply by how often you receive. Ten minutes a week is about seven hours a year. If that number is smaller than the price of an app, stay where you are and spend nothing. Shopify’s app is free and it works.

If it is bigger, what you are buying is not better printing. It is the quantities arriving already filled in, which is a different category of app. They start at nothing and reach about $20 a month, and they are compared in Shopify apps that print barcode labels from a purchase order. The ones closest to this app, and the case for staying where you are, are in Retail Barcode Labels alternatives.

The free routes, including the CSV export Shopify itself suggests, are in how to print barcode labels from a Shopify purchase order.

What to do if you stay

Most shops should stay, and there are three things worth doing if you do.

Fix the barcodes first. Anything with an empty barcode field cannot be labelled by this app or any other until you give it a code. Barcode types every Shopify store should know covers which ones you can safely invent.

Keep a note of what you printed. A line in a notebook per delivery is enough. It is the record the app does not keep, and it is what stops the second drop being labelled twice.

Label from the delivery note, not from the purchase order. The order says what you asked for. The delivery note says what turned up, and those two numbers are different often enough to matter. The difference between them, and why it costs you, is in how to receive a purchase order in Shopify.