How to Customize Packing Slips in ShipStation to Make Your Team More Efficient

A packing slip that carries what a picker actually needs takes time out of every order. Put the SKU, the warehouse location and the quantity where they can be read at a glance, and the picker stops walking back to a screen. 

If your team batch-picks rather than working order by order, pair this with Pick Lists. Pick lists are an aggregated list of all of the SKUs you need to fulfill a batch of orders as well as their location in the warehouse. 

That lets a picker collect everything for a batch in one pass instead of walking the floor per order.

What follows is the packing slip itself. Pick Lists are a separate feature and not covered here.

If you want to learn more about how to configure ShipStation holistically to allow your team to be as efficient as possible while also minimizing your fulfillment costs, you can read more here. 

What does a packing slip designed for efficiency look like?

To design a packing slip that helps your team be more efficient, it needs to have every piece of information that a picker/packer in your warehouse might spend time thinking about. 

Four things, usually.

1. What product(s) need to be picked. This is fairly obvious, but there’s a few details which make this easier. 

• Each item needs its SKU and name.

• If you have a product with variants, each variant should have a description that makes it clear what variant of the product should be picked.

• If you have them available, adding an image of each product helps pickers identify them quicker on the floor. 

• This guide shows you how to add product details in ShipStation.

2. Where the product(s) that need to be picked are located in your warehouse. 

• First, you need to set up an inventory warehouse with locations in ShipStation. This guide shows you how to do that.   
• Then map each product to its location.

3. What package the order packer needs for the order. 

• This guide shows you how to have ShipStation auto-apply the right package for each order. 

4. What additional collateral (if any) is needed in the order.   - For example, does the packer need to place a coupon or note into the package?  - This information is usually found in a “custom field” in your orders. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll assume you have this information in “custom field 1”. 

Once you have ShipStation set up to have all of this information available, it’s time to place it all on a packing slip.

Finding your packing slips

If you already know where the template editor is, skip to Customizing the packing slip.

Step 1: Accessing packing slip settings

1. Go to “Account Settings” (the gear icon in the upper right corner).

2. Select “Templates” from the sidebar menu.

3. Click on “Packing Slips” from the dropdown menu. 

4. Here, you will find all of your existing packing slips.

Step 2: Choosing a packing slip template to customize

1. Within the “Packing Slips” section, you can either create a new packing slip or select a pre-existing one. For the purposes of this guide, we’re going to select a pre-existing one.

2. Click on the three dots under “Actions” in the row of the corresponding packing slip you want to customize. 

3. Click “Edit” to open the packing slip editor with this template loaded. 

Customizing the packing slip

Now to put those four things on the slip.

You don’t need to know HTML for this. Each change is a single line, and I’ll point at the line each time.

Step 1: Set up your table headers

In the table on the packing slip that includes what products are in the order, we want to include all of the relevant information on exactly what product and where the picker can find it in the warehouse. 

The first step is to set up clear headers that let your order pickers/packers know what information is included in each column. 

1. In the packing slip template page, select the drop down titled “Order Items Header”. Here we want to create a column for every relevant piece of data we need. 

2. By default, the packing slip should include the columns (labeled as some text):  “Item”, “Description”, “QTY”, “Location”, and “Ext. Price”. 

3. Rename them so a picker can read them without thinking: “Product SKU”, “Product Description”, “Quantity”, “Warehouse Location”, “Price”.

4. To change them, all you need to do is change the text inside of the … in each line.  That’s the whole change.

Step 2: Configure the data that appears in each row

Now it’s time to configure the data that will be displayed in each row.  By default, each row of a table in a ShipStation packing slip represents a SKU in the order.  This is standard practice and something you do not want to change. 

What we want to change is the level of detail and layout of the data represented in each row. To change the data, we’re going to manipulate the fields in [brackets] that look like this example: [Sku]

To change the data you want to represent in any given column in the table, you’re going to click just before the and then select the “Field Replacements” button. Select the piece of data you want from the drop-down menu. Once you’ve done this, make sure you delete the old piece of data in the [brackets].

Keep in mind that each [data] line in the “Order Items” layout that you manipulate should correspond to a [header] line in the “Order Item Headers” layout. 

1. First line: <td class=sku>[Sku]</td>

2. Second line: <td>[Product Name]<br>[Product Description]</td> — the <br> puts the description under the name, which reads faster on the floor.

3. Third line: <td align=center>[Warehouse Location]</td>

4. Fourth line: <td align=right>[Quantity]</td>

5. Fifth line: <td align=right>[Extended Price]</td>

Step 3: Place the package and collateral information

It’s up to you where you want this to go on your packing slip but I typically recommend the “Order Footer”.  More specifically, I like it to go at the top of the order footer just below the table which contains all of the items in an order. This makes it really easy for your team to reference. 

1. In the “Order Footer”, you’re going to some lines that look like this:    <table…..>              

2. After the first (which represents a row), you should put this code just beneath it.           Collateral:  [Custom Field #1]
            Package: [Package Type]       

How the slip looks is up to you. This is about what has to be on it.

Now that you’ve created a packing slip with all of the information your fulfillment team needs to pick/pack orders efficiently, you can set it as your default template for orders.