Badge printing with a Zebra printer

Eventship prints name badges directly from the scanner to a Zebra ZD621 (or any compatible ZPL thermal printer). Badges show the attendee's name, company, event and host name, and a role chip for hosts and sponsors.

Badge printing is a Pro feature — your host must be on the Eventship Pro plan to enable it.

What you need

• Zebra ZD621 thermal label printer (or another Zebra ZPL-compatible model)
• 4" × 3" direct thermal or thermal transfer labels
• A computer with the Zebra Browser Print agent installed
• The Eventship scanner open in a browser on the same computer

One-time setup

1. Install Zebra Browser Print

Eventship talks to your Zebra printer through a tiny local service called Browser Print. You install it once on the machine that will be connected to the printer.

1. Download Browser Print from Zebra's site: https://www.zebra.com/us/en/support-downloads/software/printer-software/browser-print.html (Zebra asks you to fill in a short request form before the download starts).
2. Run the installer and follow the prompts.
3. After installing, the Browser Print agent starts automatically in the background.

Browser Print is available for macOS, Windows, and Android. It does not send anything to Zebra: it only lets your browser discover and print to printers connected to that device.

Printing from a phone instead? The Eventship mobile app prints to network Zebras directly, with no Browser Print needed. See Badge printing from the mobile app.

2. Connect your printer

Plug the Zebra ZD621 into your computer via USB (or connect it on the same network / over Bluetooth). Load 4" × 3" thermal labels. The printer's status light should be solid green.

3. Open the scanner

Go to your event's scanner page on the same computer where Browser Print is installed. Click Connect Zebra printer — the scanner will discover the printer and remember it for the session.

The first time you connect from Eventship, Browser Print shows a dialog asking whether to allow the site to access your devices. Click Accept — this is a one-time approval per site.

Printing a badge

Once a printer is connected, each time you scan an attendee's QR code you'll see a Print badge button. Click it to send the badge to your Zebra. If you need to reprint for someone (lost badge, misprint), scan their code again — you don't have to check them in a second time.

Printing onto pre-printed badges

If your badges are already printed with your own branding and you stick the thermal label on top, you can tell Eventship which part of the badge is free to use.

In the Badge Label Designer, turn on Fit into a smaller area under "Printable area". A dashed box appears on the preview. Click the box to start editing it, then drag it, resize it from any corner, or type exact measurements in inches; press Escape or click away when you are done. Everything on the badge shrinks to fit inside that box, and nothing prints outside it.

To place the box accurately, upload your badge artwork under Your badge artwork. It appears behind the preview so you can position the box against your real design. The artwork is a guide only, and never prints.

A PDF or an image both work, and neither needs measuring by hand. Upload the PDF your badge stock came as and Eventship reads its trim size, so a 4" × 6" card exported with bleed on a 4.25" × 6.25" page arrives as the 4" × 6" card at its real size. An image has no size of its own, so it arrives fitted to your label.

If your card is bigger than the label you print on (a 4" × 6" card with a 4" × 3" label stuck on it), set Width to the card's real printed width and nudge Left and Top until the label sits where you will stick it. Negative values are normal here: they push the card past the label's edge. Fit to label puts the artwork back at the label's size and corner whenever you want to start over.

Two things to watch for. If the area gets small enough that text would be hard to read on a thermal printer, the designer tells you. If it gets too small for the QR code, the code is dropped rather than printed over the name. Run a Test print and lay it on a real badge before printing a full run.

Troubleshooting

"Could not reach Zebra Browser Print" on the live site — Most often this is Chrome blocking the connection rather than a problem with the agent. Chrome 142 and later ask for permission before a website may talk to anything on your local network, and badge printing needs that permission because the printer agent runs on your own machine.

1. Click the icon to the left of the address bar on eventship.com (the lock, tune, or "View site information" icon).
2. Find Apps on device (called Local network access in Chrome 142–144) and set it to Allow. If you don't see it, click Site settings to see the full list.
3. Reload the scanner page and click Connect Zebra printer again.

If you dismissed or blocked Chrome's "wants to access devices on your local network" prompt earlier, this is where you undo it. Edge, Brave, and Opera behave the same way. Safari and Firefox do not have this restriction.

"Browser Print agent not responding" — The Browser Print service isn't running. Reopen it from your Applications folder (macOS) or Start menu (Windows).

"Browser Print is running but reported no printers" — This almost always means Browser Print hasn't approved the Eventship site, not that something is wrong with your printer. Browser Print only asks for site approval once, and to a site it hasn't approved it simply reports an empty printer list. If that dialog was dismissed or denied, open Browser Print's settings on that computer, allow eventship.com (reinstalling Browser Print also resets the list), then reload the scanner and click Connect Zebra printer again.

No printers found on the live site (eventship.com) — the scanner talks to Browser Print over a secure local connection backed by a certificate installed with the app. If your browser hasn't trusted it yet, visit https://localhost:9101 once in the same browser, proceed past the security warning, then reload the scanner and click Connect again. (You won't hit this in local testing, only on the secure live site.)

No printers found — Make sure the printer is powered on, labels are loaded, and it's connected to the same computer that has Browser Print installed.

Labels come out blank — You may have thermal transfer media without a ribbon, or direct thermal labels but the wrong setting. Check the Zebra documentation for your label stock.

The badge layout looks wrong — Make sure your labels are 4" × 3". Other sizes will crop or scale oddly.

Using a different Zebra model

Any Zebra printer that speaks ZPL should work with 4" × 3" labels. Both 203 DPI and 300 DPI print heads are supported automatically: Eventship detects the head resolution and scales the badge so it always prints at its true physical size. For a different label size, contact support and we can help tune the template.