What a shelf label must carry: unit price, discounts and sizes

Printing shelf labels looks like a design job from the outside. It is not. Most of what goes on the label is fixed by regulation, and the line skipped most often is the one written most plainly: the unit price.

What follows comes from Turkey's price labelling regulation. I give the article numbers so you can check them yourself — sector blogs copy each other on this subject and some of them are out of date.

The five things the label must carry

Article 5/2 lists them:

• The place of production
• The distinguishing feature of the goods — in practice the product name and

whatever separates it from the next one

• The selling price including all taxes — that is, VAT included
• The unit price
• The date the selling price and unit price took effect

For goods made in Turkey the mark determined by the Ministry is also required. If the packaging carries a returnable deposit, it is shown separately from the selling price.

For goods sold loose, having only the unit price instead of the selling price counts as enough.

The unit price — simple arithmetic, easy to skip

The unit price is the selling price divided by the net quantity. The difficulty is not the maths but the consistency: on handwritten labels this figure is either missing or worked out wrongly.

If 500 grams of white cheese costs 180 ₺:

180 ÷ 0.5 kg = 360.00 ₺/kg

If 100 grams of Turkish coffee costs 45 ₺:

45 ÷ 0.1 kg = 450.00 ₺/kg

Writing it per gram is not technically wrong, but 0.045 ₺/g tells nobody anything. For a customer to compare, you need the price per kilo or litre — that is what the unit price exists for in the first place.

Get one line wrong and the whole label is wrong. Doing this by hand across a hundred products is the most expensive way to make a mistake.

Discounts — the old price is a defined thing

This is where it goes wrong most often. Article 11 says two things.

One, the discounted price is shown together with the pre-discount price and legibly. Printing the new price on its own with "sale" next to it does not meet the regulation.

Two, the pre-discount price is not arbitrary: the lowest price applied in the ten days before the discount was applied. For perishables, the price immediately before the discounted one is used.

That definition exists to close the "raise it first, then discount it" game. The practical consequence: the figure you put as the old price has to come from your records, not from memory.

Sizes and printing

There is no numeric requirement for type size. Article 9 says "legible, tidy, complete, truthful, of sufficient size"; the measure of sufficient is whether it reads on the shelf.

Common A4 label sheet sizes:

• 70×37 mm — 3×8 layout, 24 labels a sheet
• 105×37 mm — 2×8 layout, 16 labels
• 52.5×29.7 mm — 4×10 layout, 40 labels
• 105×74 mm — 2×4 layout, 8 labels

Pick whichever size is printed on the box. In printing there is one critical setting: scaling at 100% (in some browsers "actual size"). Browsers shrink the page by default to make it fit, and once the scale changes the millimetre measurements shift and the labels no longer line up with the sheet.

A shelf label and a product label are not the same thing

The two get confused, but they are different jobs:

• A shelf label faces the customer. The price is mandatory, it needs a large

type size, and the unit price and the fields above have to be on it.

• A barcode label on the product faces the till. The price is optional — if

prices change often it is more practical to leave it off, since the till will read the barcode anyway.

They print on the same paper but their contents are separate. That is why there are two tools.

To do the arithmetic

We wrote the shelf and price label tool for exactly this. You paste in the product list; it works out the unit price itself, converting grams and millilitres into kilos and litres. Put a figure in the old price column and the label shows it struck through with the discount percentage.

If a required field is empty it tells you which product is missing what — it does not block printing, because forbidding a print over missing information would leave the business stuck, but you see it before you print.

You can download a long list as CSV and load the same file back later. There is no need to retype a thousand products. Excel opens the file on a double click.

If you are printing barcode labels, the barcode generator is a separate tool: it works out the EAN-13 check digit and offers Code 128 for codes containing letters.

Both are free, ask for no sign-up, and the data you enter never leaves your browser — nothing is sent to any server.

Source

Turkey's price labelling regulation, articles 5, 9 and 11. If the text of the regulation changes, the article numbers in this piece may go out of date; check the current text before making a product decision. This is not legal advice.