A well designed packing slip can help your fulfillment staff be up to 25% more efficient when fulfilling orders. How can you make your packing slips better to save more than 20 seconds per order? Let's find out!
Tyler Douglas
Customizing your packing slip in ShipStation can significantly enhance the efficiency of your fulfillment team. By including detailed information about what’s needed to fulfill orders as well as where pickers should go in your warehouse to get what’s needed, you can shave off as much as 25% of time related to fulfillment.
Now if you want to be as efficient as possible, I also recommend that you use Pick Lists from ShipStation to allow your team to batch pick the products you need for orders. 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.
This means you can pick everything at once instead of doing it on an order-by-order basis. This will significantly reduce the time your team spends walking the floor to pick orders.
This blog post will guide you through the exact steps required to customize your packing slips within ShipStation to maximize efficiency. It does not include how to make Pick Lists.
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.
Furthermore, If you want to fully customize the appearance of your packing slips to be personalized to your brand, I’d recommend checking out https://www.shipstationtemplates.com/. Here you can purchase templated ShipStation packing slips or even have a fully custom one built for you.
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.
Usually, this comes down to 4 things.
1. What product(s) need to be picked. This is fairly obvious, but there’s a few details which make this easier.
- Make sure each item has it’s 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.
- Second, you need to map each product to it’s inventory location. Follow This guide to do so, under “Shipping” for each product add the “Warehouse 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!
First things first, let’s figure out how to actually find the packing slip you want to customize. If you already know how to do this, you can skip ahead the section titled, “Customizing Your Packing Slips”.
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.
Remember the 4 things we need to make an efficient packing slip? Here we’re going to walk through how to add that information to your packing slips.
It’s okay if you don’t know anything about HTML! I’m going to make it super easy for you to follow along.
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 <th>some text</th>): “Item”, “Description”, “QTY”, “Location”, and “Ext. Price”.
3. It’s up to you whether or not you want to change the names of the headers for each column. I recommend that you rename them as follows but it’s up to you: “Product SKU”, “Product Description”, “Quantity”, “Warehouse Location”, and “Price”.
4. To change them, all you need to do is change the text inside of the <th>...</th> in each line. That’s it!
Step 2: Configure the Data That Will Appear in Each Row of the Table
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:
<td class=sku>[Sku]</td>
To change the data you want to represent in any given column in the table, you’re going to click just before the </td> 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 <td>[data]</td> line in the “Order Items” layout that you manipulate should correspond to a <th>[header]</th> line in the “Order Item Headers” layout.
1. The first line should look like this:
<td class=sku>[Sku]</td>
2. The second line should look like this:
<td>[. roduct Name]<br>[Product Description]</td>
The <br> is a line break that will put the product description below the product name to make it easier to read.
3. The third line should look like this:
<td align=center>[Warehouse Location]</td>
4. The fourth line should look like this:
<td. align=right>[Quantity]</td>
5. And the fifth line should look like this:
<th aline=right>[Extended Price]</th>
Step 3: Place the Package Information and Collateral information on the Packing Slip
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…..>
<tbody>
<tr>
2. After the first <tr> (which represents a row), you should put this code just beneath it.
<td rowspan="4" class="notes">
Collateral: [Custom Field #1]<br>
Package: [Package Type]
</td>
Again, you can decide how to design your packing slip to be more customized to your brand. This guide is more about telling you what information should be included on the packing slip. If you want a fully customized packing slip, I recommend checking out https://www.shipstationtemplates.com/ for this.
Now that you’ve created a packing slip with all of the information your fulfillment team needs to pick/pack orders efficiently, you can start using them as your default template for orders!