This article is meant for troubleshooting common issues that arise during the label printing process. If you would like a guide to printing labels, click the button below:

First, we should clarify our terms, as different businesses use the terms, SKU, Barcode, and visible barcode differently. 

When talking about printing price tags/labels, you are referring to a VISIBLE barcode. Sometimes this can be a UPC. In Thrive Inventory by Shopventory, you can create a visible barcode using either the SKU or Barcode fields. 

This is usually because your machine doesn’t have that information in its “drivers”. Drivers are like how-to manuals for your computer and can easily be installed.

Below we have links to the official pages where you can find and download drivers for the label style you need:

Driver Links:

Clover currently does not allow files to be downloaded onto their hardware, so Thrive is prevented from serving PDF files to your device for label printing. 

For now, labels can only be printed from a non-Clover device

Overall, desktop computers are best for printing labels

If the sizing looks to be off, that can be due to scaling issues. You can try some of the steps below to adjust the sizing:

This is a known printer issue. When printing multiple pages of Avery labels, the second (and any more than the first) page may print a few millimeters higher than the first page. 

If you configure the printer to skip the first page and just print the second page and onward, it does print correctly.

This issue tends to affect older and home printers. 

This message pops up when you have selected a product that doesn't exist at the selected location. Try selecting a different location when printing that label, or update the Location settings for that specific product.

The visible barcode that we see on products is generated by a specific algorithm. 

A number must be in a recognized industry format in order to be represented as a visual barcode on a tag/label. Learn more 

We offer SKU generation as a feature in Thrive Inventory. Our system does the work for you!

A random combination of 12 numbers may just happen to be in an accepted SKU format. Just like if you combine 3 or 4 random letters, some of those will happen to form words.

You just happened to make up a SKU/barcode that follows the algorithm required by the label option you selected.

As mentioned in the previous question, visible barcodes are generated according to a mathematical algorithm. 

Simply changing the last digit may not follow the equation required. This would be why the SKU/barcodes could be invalidated.

In the US, this is the ISBN found in books. Note: The ISBN is 13 characters when you include the hyphens.