ZSB Series Printers for eCommerce – New Ecosystem for Zebra Developers

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated change and eCommerce businesses fast forwarded more like seven years in that short time, much like a time machine found in some of your favorite movies. Technology developments anticipated their launches and deployments, demand trends increased as never before, and digitalization of new players added more competitors to this space.  Zebra was ready to support not only our front workers in the retail industry, logistics, and healthcare, but also to support home business owners that every day are creating and developing new online businesses and taking advantage of multiple e-commerce platforms as eBay, Etsy, Shopify, etc., with our new ZSB Series printer.

Launching this past May 2021, Zebra developed the first generation of a Cloud thermal printer for e-commerce market to satisfy our line of consumer customers

In aligning with consumer demanding users, the new printer is very easy to use. Let’s review all new end-user benefits on the table below:

The architecture (Wi-Fi/Cloud printer) has been well received by end-users. Zebra created a whole new user experience along with a set of tools. This is providing   new opportunities for Z-developers to explore inexhaustible new use cases in multiple e-commerce ecosystems with one thing in common, the labels printing needed for multiple purposes, include digitalization of assets that allowing optimization of daily operations as home business owners.

ZSB series printer uses label cartridges to solve the “jammable” roll media headache, so for developers trying to implement this new printer in their workflows, we made the “implementation” easier for them focusing on how 3rd party apps are working in the market, and then we adapted to those conditions so developers can continue creating a more valuable and better user experience with their applications. We strived to keep the printing complexity out of equation. However, there is one thing that the developer should consider with ZSB series printer, and it is what type of cartridges  to support with its application. Please see graphic below for details.

In fact, for mobile printing we have developed a new feature to Print PDF, so third-party apps can implement this feature on their workflows without changing any comma to their codes and/or thinking about ZPL programing. During our research we found that more than 95% of the mobile apps, leading the segment in shipment management or e-commerce are printing their labels already converted in PDF.

With the above milestone achieved in our journey to offer the best-in-class thermal printer experience for e-commerce’s end-users, we are focusing on the next step for developers. We will be planning to add new tools for developers to help automate small-business printing tasks. The expectation is to help ZSB users to increase their productivity through integration with third-party apps. In summary, we can expect three main use cases.

• • • • Users with multiple ZSB ISV accounts (Shopify, ebay, Etsy) with integrated shipment services in their accounts (FedEx, UPS, USPS) that generate orders to process autonomously and with need to increase speed of shipments.

      • Users of ZSB printers sharing workspace in different locations (home, office, small-warehouse, small-retail-store) to manage remote orders of shipping labels or inventory labels triggered automatically to print by 3^rd party app.

      • Users managing 2+ ZSB printers in different locations with minimum labor force resources and with variable fulfillment volumes of daily orders optimized by automated workflows.

To accomplish the use cases above, we will be planning to offer a bundle of Cloud APIs through our Zebra Data Services platform allowing ISVs to directly control the printer, receive status and notifications of the printers, and the most important feature, send ZPL jobs triggered automatically as required by third-party app, or by the automated workflow that optimizes those operations.

It is also a Call-to-Action to our Z-developers in e-commerce space that anticipate tools that are waiting for ZSB series integration. If you have use cases that can be covered through these APIs, or if you want to share with us a different use case, or if you would be interested in participating in our Early Adopter Program (EAP) for testing/integrating the new infrastructure for this potential release during 2022 or later. Please, contact us and let us know that you are interested. Email us directly to ISV_NALA_Support@zebra.com.