Anatomy of a Shipping Label: What Makes Up a Shipping Label?
by Chelsea Camper | Last Updated December 30, 2015What makes a shipping label a shipping label? What are the important parts?
Here we’ll talk about some of the major parts of a shipping label. While we won’t go into detail in this post, we’ll give you a good overview about what you’re looking at when you’re looking at your shipping label.
Ship To & Ship From
The Ship To and Ship From serve as an easy way for someone to read where the package is coming from and where a package is going. This is especially valuable if the barcode were to get damaged and become unreadable.
Shipping Barcodes
There can be more than just one barcode per shipping label. Some shipping labels may have a separate barcode for shipping while others have the same data in multiple barcodes in case it needs to be read in a different barcode type.
Quiet Zones
Around each barcode there is a “Quiet Zone” of white space. It’s important to respect the Quiet Zone and not put anything in it to make sure the barcodes can be read. If the Quiet Zone has anything within it, it could render the barcode unreadable or make it harder to be read.
Shipment Method Information
Information about how the package will be shipped can also be found on the shipping label. For example: GND for Ground shipments
Order Information
Many times you’ll find order information on the shipping label including Invoice Number, Reference Number, PO Number, etc.
Package Information
This includes the Ship Date, weight of the package, how many packages are in the shipment and which package this is (example: 3 of 5), etc.
There are some other tidbits of information on shipping labels, but these are all key parts.
Looking for some shipping label sheets to print your shipping labels on?
