Shopify shipping labels are bought from inside an order’s fulfillment screen: pick the package, confirm the ship-from location and the real weight, rate-shop across Shopify Shipping and any connected carrier accounts, and buy. The purchase itself takes under a minute once the package profile is set up correctly. Most of what goes wrong with shipping labels with Shopify happens either before that minute — a weight field left at an estimate instead of a scaled number — or after it, in printing, bulk runs, voids and packing slips, where the setting that would have prevented the problem is easy to miss the first time through.
What Do You Need Before You Buy Your First Shopify Shipping Label?
Three things need to exist before the fulfillment screen is worth opening. First, a payment method on the store’s Shopify Shipping balance, since labels are charged at purchase, not invoiced later. Second, at least one carrier account connected — Shopify Shipping’s own negotiated rates work out of the box in eligible markets, and a store’s own UPS or FedEx account can be connected alongside it in Settings > Shipping and delivery. Third, and the step most setup guides skip, a package profile for every box or mailer actually used at the pack station, built in Settings > Shipping and delivery > Packages with a real tare weight and real outer dimensions, not placeholders.
That third item matters more than it looks. Every later step in this guide — the weight you enter, the rate you get quoted, the bulk run you eventually want to run — inherits whatever the package profile says. A profile built from a guess instead of a scale is a mistake made once that then repeats on every order that uses it.
How Do You Buy and Print a Shopify Shipping Label, Step by Step?
Eight steps, covering a single order from an empty package profile list to a fulfilled order with a printed label attached.
Step 1: Set Up Package Profiles Before You Buy Your First Label
Open Settings > Shipping and delivery > Packages and add a profile for every distinct box, poly mailer or envelope the warehouse actually packs with. Weigh each empty package on a scale and enter that tare weight — the box or mailer’s own weight before anything goes in it — along with its outer length, width and height. This is a one-time setup cost that pays back on the very first order, because the fulfillment screen pre-fills from whatever profile you select, and an accurate profile means less to get wrong per order, not more to check.
Step 2: Open the Order and Start Fulfillment
From the order’s detail page, select Fulfill items. On a multi-location store, this is where Shopify asks which location the order ships from if it isn’t obvious from inventory allocation. This screen is Shopify’s rate-shopping surface — it pulls the order’s items, whatever weight and package data is available, and the destination address, and uses all three to return carrier options in Step 4.
Step 3: Confirm the Ship-From Location and Enter the Real Package Weight
Check the ship-from location against where the order is physically being packed — easy to get wrong on a store running more than one warehouse or a hybrid in-house-plus-3PL setup. Select the package profile matching the actual box in front of you, then look at the weight field specifically: it will show the profile’s tare weight plus whatever Shopify estimated for the order’s items from the product catalogue, and that estimate is not the same thing as what the packed box weighs on a scale. Overwrite it with the scaled number every time. This single field is where a carrier reweigh adjustment — an unannounced later charge for the gap between the declared weight and the scanned weight — starts or doesn’t.
Step 4: Choose the Carrier and Service Rate
Shopify returns a list of rate options — Shopify Shipping’s negotiated rates and, if connected, your own carrier account’s rates, both reacting to the weight entered in Step 3. Compare delivery speed against price for this specific order rather than defaulting to the cheapest or the first option every time; a customer who paid for expedited shipping at checkout needs a matching service level bought here, not just any label.
Step 5: Buy the Label
Select Buy shipping label. This charges the store’s Shopify Shipping balance or card on file immediately, generates the tracking number, and — if the shipping confirmation notification is turned on in Settings > Notifications — triggers an automatic email to the customer. The order’s fulfillment status updates at this point, at purchase, which matters for Step 8.
Step 6: Choose Print Label, or Print Label and Packing Slip
Shopify offers a combined print — label and packing slip on one PDF — or the label alone. The combined option saves a trip to the printer on a standard printer setup, but it doesn’t work cleanly on a dedicated thermal label printer, which is built to print label-sized files only. Pick based on which printer is actually at the pack station, not habit.
Step 7: Set the Correct Label Size in the Print Dialog for Your Printer
The label-size setting in the browser’s print dialog is what produces the most confused first-week support tickets from a new fulfillment hire. In that dialog, the label size has to be set to match the printer: 4 x 6 inches for a thermal label printer, 8.5 x 11 inches for a standard printer producing a full sheet to trim or fold. Sending a 4 x 6 file to a full-page printer without selecting that size prints a label scaled down or cropped in a way that a carrier’s handheld scanner sometimes can’t read cleanly at the depot.
Step 8: Attach the Label and Mark the Order Fulfilled
Confirm the printed label matches the order — right address, right weight class visible on the label, right tracking number against what Shopify shows on the order. Shopify marks the order fulfilled at the moment the label is purchased, not at the later point when the carrier physically scans the package into its network, which is a separate event the tracking number reflects once it happens.
What Printer and Format Should You Use for Shopify Shipping Labels?
The honest answer is that either works, and the right one depends on volume, not on what looks more professional. A standard inkjet or laser printer needs no extra hardware and prints fine at low volume, but every label costs a full sheet of paper and a trim or fold step. A dedicated thermal label printer — Zebra and Rollo models are the two most commonly used with Shopify — prints a 4 x 6 label directly with no ink, no paper waste and no cutting, and pays for its own cost quickly once a store is printing more than a handful of labels a day.
Whichever printer is in use, the label-size setting in the print dialog (Step 7) has to match it. This is a setting, not a printer capability — the same thermal printer produces a correctly scanned label or a garbled one depending entirely on whether 4 x 6 was selected before printing.
How Do You Print Shopify Shipping Labels in Bulk?
From the Orders list, select multiple orders that are all in the same fulfillment state, then use the bulk action to create shipping labels. Shopify rate-shops and buys a label for every selected order in a single pass and produces one combined PDF to send to the printer, which is the difference between fulfilling forty orders one at a time and fulfilling them in the time it takes to review one screen.
Bulk runs only save time safely once package profiles (Step 1) are accurate, because a bulk purchase applies whatever weight and profile data Shopify has on file for each order without pausing for a per-order check the way the single-order flow does. Mixing box sizes into one bulk batch without matching each order to its real package profile buys the same weight-mismatch mistake covered next, at whatever volume the batch was.
What’s the Step Most Teams Get Wrong Buying Shopify Shipping Labels?
Entering an estimated weight instead of a scaled one. It’s the single most common mistake in this whole workflow, and it’s also the hardest one to notice, because it doesn’t fail at the point where the mistake happens. The label buys fine. The order fulfills fine. The customer gets their tracking email fine. The problem shows up days later, when the carrier’s network re-scans and re-weighs a sample of in-transit parcels — standard practice at UPS, FedEx and USPS alike — and finds the actual weight doesn’t match what the label was bought for. The carrier bills the difference to the account that purchased the label, as a line item on a later invoice or Shopify Shipping charge, with no warning at the point of purchase and no flag anywhere in the order timeline connecting it back to which order caused it.
The fix isn’t a setting you toggle once — it’s a scale at the pack station and a habit of overwriting the weight field with the real number on every order, every time, instead of trusting the package profile’s default or the product catalogue’s stated weight. A catalogue weight is what someone entered when the product was created; a scale reading is what the carrier actually measures. Only one of those two numbers is the one the carrier bills against.
How Do You Void or Reprint a Shopify Shipping Label?
Voiding and reprinting solve two different problems, and mixing them up wastes either time or money. Void a label from the order’s shipping label section when the label is wrong — wrong address, wrong weight, wrong service — and hasn’t been scanned into the carrier’s network yet; the void submits a refund request to the carrier, which posts to the Shopify Shipping balance once the carrier confirms the label was never used. Reprint a label instead when the label itself was correct but the physical copy is gone — jammed, faded, misplaced before it made it onto the box — since reprinting renders the same already-purchased label again with no new charge and no refund request involved. Voiding a label that’s still fine and simply reprinting a label that has the wrong address are the two ways to get this backwards.
An address correction on an already-purchased label is usually not a free edit most carriers support after the fact; voiding and buying a fresh label with the right address is the more reliable path once a mistake is caught.
What Belongs on the Shopify Packing Slip, and Where Do You Edit It?
The shipping label and the packing slip are two different documents produced by two related but separate parts of the fulfillment flow. The label carries the carrier’s barcode and delivery address and rides on the outside of the box; the packing slip lists what’s inside and ships with the order. Its content and layout live in Settings > Notifications > Packing slip, edited as a Liquid template rather than through a settings toggle — which means changes to add a return policy line, adjust which fields show per line item, or add a thank-you note are a small code edit, worth testing against a real order before it becomes what every customer sees inside every box.
Getting labels and rates right is only half of what makes fulfilment predictable at $3M–$30M in revenue — the rate structure a label draws from is its own setup, covered in the Shopify shipping rates guide, and at high enough order volume, some stores outgrow buying labels one screen at a time inside Shopify altogether and move to a dedicated shipping software platform that layers rate shopping, batch printing and carrier rules on top of what Shopify’s own fulfillment screen does natively. A store running its own warehouse rather than a 3PL usually feels the bulk-printing and package-profile setup covered here alongside its pick-and-pack process, since the two are operated by the same team on the same shift.
Shipping-label accuracy is not a one-time setup task. A package profile that was accurate when it was built goes stale the moment packaging changes — a supplier switches box sizes, a new SKU needs a different mailer — and nothing in Shopify flags that drift on its own. Treating shipping-label accuracy as an ops automation problem, with someone scheduled to re-check package profiles against what’s actually on the shelf, is what catches a reweigh charge before it’s a pattern instead of after the third invoice line asks why.
Sources
No external figures are quoted; this article is written from how Shopify’s shipping label, package profile, printing and packing slip settings are configured and operated.