My shipping room does not have a glamorous line item in it. It has packing slips, shipping labels, return labels, the occasional commercial invoice, and a few marketing inserts that go in the box on the orders I care about. All of that runs through a printer, and every year somebody in the Ecommerce Paradise community asks me the same question: what is the best place to buy printer ink for a business like this?
I have been running high-ticket stores since October 2010, and I want to give you the honest version of the answer rather than the version that pays the most commission. The honest version has three parts. The biggest saving in this whole category is not a cheaper cartridge, it is not using ink for labels at all. The second biggest is buying the high yield version of whatever cartridge you do need. And the third, the one everybody starts with, is choosing a cheaper seller, which turns out to be worth a few dollars a year rather than a few hundred.
So I priced it. On 23 September 2026 I took one cartridge that almost every seller in this category stocks, the Brother TN660 high yield black toner, and I priced the compatible version and the original version at every retailer I could actually read a price on. Then I read the shipping policy, the return policy, the guarantee and the price match policy at each one. Every figure below has the page it came from next to it.
What came back surprised me in one specific way, and it is the thing this article exists to tell you. Several of the storefronts that look like competitors are the same company selling the same stock at the same price. Comparison shopping between them is not comparison shopping. Here is all of it.
Take your document printing down to about forty six dollars a year
The cheapest compatible Brother TN660 I found on 23 September 2026 was $19.95 for 2,600 pages, which is 0.77 cents a page. Brother’s own price for the same cartridge that day was $71.49, which is 2.75 cents. On 6,000 pages a year that is $46.04 against $164.98.
Before You Buy Any Ink, Check Whether You Need It
The single largest printing cost in a shipping room is usually shipping labels, and shipping labels should not go through an ink or toner printer at all. A thermal label printer uses heat and heat sensitive label stock. There is no cartridge, no toner, no ink, and therefore no consumable except the labels themselves.
If you are printing labels on an inkjet today, no cartridge price in this article will save you what switching the machine will. I covered the hardware side of that decision in my roundup of the best shipping label printers for small business. The supplies side is in my guide to printing shipping labels without overpaying for supplies.
Once the printer is sorted you still need label stock, and my Betckey review covers a cheap source for it.
Read that as the actual recommendation rather than as a preamble. Do the machine first. Everything below is about the printing that is left over once labels are off the ink printer: packing slips, invoices, supplier paperwork, return authorisations and inserts.
Cost Per Page, Not Cost Per Cartridge
The number that decides this category is cost per page, and it is the number almost nobody puts on a comparison. It is the cartridge price divided by the page yield the seller publishes for that cartridge. If a seller will not publish a page yield next to the price, you cannot compare them to anyone, and you should treat that as the answer.
Page yields in this industry are quoted against ISO test methods at 5 percent page coverage, which is roughly a page of ordinary text. LD Products states this plainly on its own product page, noting that its yield figure is an average cartridge page yield in accordance with ISO-19752. That matters for a shipping room because a packing slip with a logo across the header and a barcode block covers far more than 5 percent of the sheet. Treat every yield in this article as a ceiling you will not quite hit, and treat the comparisons between them as valid, because every seller here is measuring the same way.
One cartridge, priced everywhere, 23 September 2026
Here is the Brother TN660 high yield black, 2,600 pages published yield, across every seller I could read a live price on. I have linked every name in the table. The two original cartridges are at the bottom because they are a different product, not a worse deal on the same one.
| Where | Type | Price | Cost per page | Stock when I checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CompAndSave | Compatible | $19.95 | 19.95 / 2,600 = 0.77 cents | In stock |
| ComboInk | Compatible | $19.95 | 19.95 / 2,600 = 0.77 cents | In stock |
| LD Products | Compatible | $21.99 | 21.99 / 2,600 = 0.85 cents | In stock |
| 4inkjets | Compatible | $21.99 | 21.99 / 2,600 = 0.85 cents | In stock |
| Brother direct | Original | $71.49 | 71.49 / 2,600 = 2.75 cents | In stock |
| LD Products | Original | $72.71 | 72.71 / 2,600 = 2.80 cents | In stock |
That is six listings at four companies, and I counted them. It is not every seller of this cartridge in America. It is every one I could read a live, public, re-checkable price on in one session, which is a different and more honest claim.
Two things jump out of that table. The first is the gap between compatible and original, which is real and large. The second is the gap between the cheapest compatible seller and the most expensive compatible seller, which is $2.04 on a single cartridge.
What those gaps are worth over a year
Say your shipping room prints 6,000 pages a year of documents, which is 500 a month across packing slips, invoices and paperwork. Run each price through it and show the working.
At 0.77 cents a page the compatible TN660 from CompAndSave or ComboInk costs 6,000 x $0.0076731 = $46.04, across 6,000 / 2,600 = 2.31 cartridges. At 0.85 cents the same cartridge from LD Products or 4inkjets costs 6,000 x $0.0084577 = $50.75. At 2.75 cents Brother’s own cartridge costs 6,000 x $0.0274962 = $164.98.
So switching from the original cartridge to a compatible one saves $118.94 a year at that volume. Switching from the more expensive compatible seller to the cheaper one saves $4.71 a year. Both of those are true, and only one of them is worth any of your attention.
I am labouring this because the entire ink affiliate industry, this article included, has an incentive to make the second number sound like the first. It is not. If you spend an afternoon price shopping compatible cartridges across four websites, you are working for something under five dollars a year. Pick one that publishes yields, buy the high yield version, and go back to selling.
The Storefronts That Are The Same Store
Here is the finding that changed how I would shop this category, and it is the reason the price table above has two pairs of identical numbers in it.
CompAndSave and ComboInk are the same business. That is not an inference from the pricing. When I loaded comboink.com on 23 September 2026, the site’s own stylesheet and image paths referenced a theme directory named Compandsave, 49 times on the homepage alone. Both sites listed the same compatible TN660 at $19.95 against the same $58.49 retail comparison, with the same published 2,600 page yield.
The coupon pages closed it. On 23 September 2026 ComboInk’s coupon page published three codes, all expiring 09/30/2026: RESET for 10 percent off orders of $65 or more, THRIVE for 9 percent off inks only, and FOCUS for 8 percent off combo packs. CompAndSave’s coupon page published three codes, all expiring 09/30/2026: WARMTH for 10 percent off orders of $65 or more, COMFORT for 9 percent off inks only, and SNUG for 8 percent off combo packs. Same three offers, same three percentages, same expiry date, different words.
LD Products and 4inkjets pair up the same way. Both sell the compatible TN660 at $21.99 under the identical internal SKU, TN660CTS, and both serve it from an identically structured product page.
The practical consequence is simple. There are fewer sellers in this category than there are websites, so “I checked four sites” usually means you checked two companies. If you want a genuine second quote, get it from the other pair, or from the manufacturer.
Not sure any of this is the cost worth fixing?
The whole argument above is worth $118.94 a year, and choosing between compatible sellers is worth $4.71. Moving your labels off the ink printer entirely removes the line item. That decision is hardware, and it is covered separately.
Where Compatible Is Fine, And Where It Is Not
Compatible cartridges are third party cartridges built to work in a printer they were not made by. Remanufactured cartridges are original shells that have been cleaned, refilled and retested. Original, which sellers label OEM, means the cartridge the printer manufacturer sells.
For internal paperwork I use compatible without hesitating. Packing slips, invoices, supplier agreements, return authorisations, warehouse checklists, anything whose job is to be legible. The print quality on a monochrome laser is not a meaningful variable at that job, and the cost difference is $118.94 a year at the volume above.
For anything a customer sees in colour, I am more careful. Branded inserts, thank you cards, anything with your logo in a specific colour. Colour match on compatible inkjet cartridges varies between production runs, and a slightly wrong brand colour on an insert in a $3,000 order reads as cheapness in exactly the place you were trying to buy goodwill. That is a judgement call rather than a measurement, and it is mine, but it is the rule I run.
Who should just buy original and stop reading
There is a group of people for whom this entire article is a waste of an afternoon, and I would rather say so than sell them a cartridge.
If your printer is enrolled in a manufacturer programme that locks it to genuine cartridges, compatible cartridges will not work at all. CompAndSave publishes its own explainer on the HP+ programme and states outright that its ink and toner will not function on a printer with HP+ enabled. If that is your machine, the decision is made for you.
If you print under about 1,000 pages a year, the arithmetic does not clear the hassle. At 1,000 pages the compatible saving over original is 1,000 x ($0.0274962 minus $0.0076731) = $19.82 a year. That is not a project.
And if a cartridge failure would stop you shipping on a day you cannot afford to miss, buy the original, keep a spare, and treat the difference as insurance. Compatible cartridges are good now, but “good” is a rate, not a guarantee, and the failure lands at the worst moment by definition.
The warranty question, answered properly
People ask whether a third party cartridge voids the printer warranty, and the answer in the United States is mostly no, with an important carve out. The governing law is the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. The FTC’s Businessperson’s Guide to Federal Warranty Law puts the general rule this way: “With some exceptions, Section 102 (c) of the Act prohibits you from including a tie-in sales provision in your warranty.”
A tie-in sales provision is a term saying you must use the manufacturer’s own consumables to keep coverage. Those are generally not allowed. What is still allowed is declining to cover damage a third party part actually caused. So the practical position is that using a compatible cartridge does not by itself void your warranty, and if a compatible cartridge leaks into a fuser, that repair is your problem. None of this is legal advice, the rules vary by state, and the only document that binds anybody is the warranty that came with your machine.
Shipping, Returns And Guarantees, Read Rather Than Assumed
The sticker price is not the price. Here is what each seller actually publishes, read on 23 September 2026.
| Seller | Free shipping over | Under that | Guarantee as published |
|---|---|---|---|
| CompAndSave | $50, before tax and after discount | $3.99 | Low price guarantee with published terms, 365 day return window |
| ComboInk | $50, before tax and after discount, or $35 for email subscribers | $3.99 | Advertises a low price guarantee and a one year satisfaction guarantee, no terms page published |
| LD Products | $50 | $5.99 | Lifetime 100 percent satisfaction guarantee on LD brand cartridges |
| 4inkjets | See LD Products, same catalogue and SKU | See LD Products | Same catalogue as LD Products |
| Brother direct | Not published on the product page I read | Not published on the product page I read | Manufacturer warranty on the cartridge |
One sentence in the shipping policies does more damage to a budget than anything else in them, and both ComboInk and CompAndSave publish it. The CompAndSave shipping policy states that typically, if your order includes toner cartridges, it will not qualify for flat rate or free shipping. Toner is heavy. If you are budgeting a toner order against a free shipping threshold, read that line before you assume the threshold applies to you.
The returns fine print at ComboInk is unusually layered, and worth knowing before rather than after. Its return policy gives free returns within 10 days of carrier delivery on orders placed with the $3.99 standard shipping option. After that, and up to 365 days from order placement, non defective unopened cartridges get you store credit with no fee or a refund with a 15 percent restocking fee. Every return needs a Return Authorization Number first, the goods have to be back within 30 days of setting the return up, and if you return an entire order that shipped free, $4.95 comes off the refund. Original cartridges are stricter: unopened only, set up within 15 days, and a 15 percent restocking fee on all unopened items.
The price match difference, stated carefully
This one deserves precision because it is easy to get backwards, and I had it backwards myself in an older article on this site.
CompAndSave publishes a low price guarantee page with actual terms. It will match a competitor’s lower advertised price on the same brand, model, condition and combo pack, you email the proof of price as a link while the price is live, and the page names the exclusions: free offers, limited quantity items, clearance, financing, special sale offers and promotions, and pricing errors. It also states it will not match a price that has itself already been reduced by a price match, and that an out of stock competitor price does not qualify.
ComboInk advertises a low price guarantee in its own words on its homepage, in the sentence “Our low-price guarantee paired with our one-year 100% satisfaction guarantee makes sure you get high-quality prints, even while on a budget.” What it does not do is publish a page setting out what that guarantee covers. I checked every one of the 32 pages in its static sitemap, and there is no low price guarantee page, no terms, and no exclusions list.
So the accurate statement is not that ComboInk has no price match. It is that ComboInk advertises one and publishes no terms for it, while CompAndSave advertises one and publishes the terms. If you intend to actually use a price match, that difference is the whole thing.
Two Sellers To Cross Off, And Why
A roundup that only lists winners is a sales page. Two names that come up in this category deserve a straight answer.
Databazaar was for about two decades one of the better known online printer supply retailers, and it is still filed that way in a lot of bookmarks and affiliate directories. It does not sell printer supplies any more. On 23 September 2026 I pulled its full sitemap, 18 sub sitemaps and 9,261 URLs including 8,998 product pages, and searched every product URL. Zero contained toner, zero contained cartridge, zero contained printer and zero contained inkjet. Its own on site search for toner returns a Fila cologne. The store now sells fragrances, jewellery and leather goods, and I wrote up that pivot in full in my Databazaar review. If you came here from an old bookmark, that is why the ink is gone.
The big box option, meaning Staples and Office Depot, I could not price in this session. Their product pages either refused automated requests or served me an unrelated product, and I am not going to publish a figure I did not read. That is a limit of my method rather than a finding about their prices, and you should check them yourself if you have a store nearby, because same day pickup has a value that does not show up in a cost per page table.
If what you actually want is to consolidate cartridges, paper, mailers and general supplies onto one purchase order rather than optimise a single line, a broad line wholesaler is a better shape of answer than any ink specialist. Bulk Office Supply is the one I have looked at. I went through the trade offs in full in the Bulk Office Supply review.
What I Would Actually Do
Here is the order of operations, which is deliberately not the order the affiliate links would prefer.
First, move shipping labels onto a thermal printer so they stop consuming ink at all. Second, work out which cartridge your remaining printer takes and buy the high yield version of it, because the high yield and standard yield of the same cartridge are sold side by side and the standard one is almost always the worse deal per page. Brother’s own page shows this cleanly: the high yield TN660 at $71.49 sits next to the standard yield TN630 at $48.79, and you are not saving $22.70, you are buying fewer pages.
Third, pick one compatible seller that publishes a page yield next to the price, buy from them, and stop shopping. On what I read on 23 September 2026 the cheapest of the four was CompAndSave and ComboInk at $19.95, and since those two are one company at the same price, the tiebreaker is that CompAndSave publishes price match terms and ComboInk does not. LD Products and 4inkjets cost $4.71 a year more at this volume and back their cartridges with a lifetime guarantee against a 365 day window, which is a fair trade if you would rather have the longer guarantee than the smaller number.
Fourth, if you print anything a customer sees in colour, buy the original cartridge for that job and compatible for everything else. The cost difference on the small number of pages that matters is trivial, and the downside of a wrong brand colour on an insert is not.
And then stop. Consumables are the smallest fixable line in an ecommerce operation, and getting the whole thing from $164.98 to $46.04 is a good afternoon’s work exactly once. A single $2,000 order at a sensible margin clears more than this entire category costs you in a year, which is why I keep pushing people toward the high-ticket niches list instead. The framework behind it is in what high-ticket dropshipping actually is.
If you have not yet done the business formation work for a dropshipping company, that is a better use of the same afternoon. So is my complete guide to finding high-ticket suppliers if you are still hunting for the right one.
There is a lot more of that thinking across Ecommerce Paradise.
One last caveat on everything above. Prices in this category move constantly, and the three coupon codes I quoted expire on 30 September 2026. Every figure here is dated 23 September 2026 and I have linked the page I read it on so you can re-check it rather than trust me. The structural findings, that some of these storefronts are the same company, that cost per page is the only comparison that works, and that thermal labels remove the problem rather than shrinking it, will outlast the numbers.
Fix the order value, not the cartridge
The best possible outcome in this article is saving $118.94 a year. One high-ticket sale at a 25 percent margin on a $2,000 order clears $500. If you want somebody to look at your niche, your margins and your supplier list and tell you plainly which of the three is broken, that is what the coaching is for.
Related Articles
If you found this useful, these guides go deeper on related topics:
- Best Shipping Label Printer for Small Business: Top Picks for 2026
- How to Print Shipping Labels Without Overpaying for Supplies
- CompAndSave Review 2026: Is the Brand Worth Buying or Selling?
- ComboInk Review 2026
- Best Business Check Printers for an Ecommerce LLC in 2026
- Stamps.com Pricing 2026: Every Plan and What It Actually Costs
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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