Batch Label Printing: Save Two Hours a Day

At a shipping meetup last year, I watched a seller print labels one at a time for eighty orders. Open order, verify address, select service, enter weight, click print, peel label, stick it on the box, move to the next order. Each label took about ninety seconds. Two solid hours of clicking, waiting, peeling, and sticking before a single package went out the door.

The next month, she had switched to batch printing. Same eighty orders, twelve minutes total. She could not believe she had spent months doing it the slow way.

If you are still printing shipping labels individually, batch printing is probably the single biggest time savings available to you — and it requires no new equipment, no new staff, and roughly ten minutes to set up.

How Batch Printing Works

The concept is simple: instead of generating one label at a time, you select a group of orders and generate all their labels in a single action. Your pending orders appear in a queue. You select the ones you want to ship — all of them, or a filtered subset. You assign shipping services either manually, through predefined rules, or by letting the software auto-select the cheapest option. You click print once. Labels come out of the printer in sequence. You match each label to its package and apply it.

The bottleneck shifts from your clicking speed to your printer's output speed. A thermal label printer can produce a label every three to five seconds. At that pace, eighty labels take roughly five minutes to print, plus another five to seven minutes to match and apply them. Compare that to the ninety seconds per label of the one-at-a-time approach.

The Math on Time Savings

When you print labels one at a time, each label involves opening the order (five seconds), verifying the items and address (ten seconds), selecting the carrier and service level (eight seconds), entering the package weight (five seconds), clicking create label (two seconds), waiting for the label to generate (five seconds), waiting for the printer (five seconds), peeling and applying the label (ten seconds), and navigating to the next order (five seconds). That is 55 to 90 seconds per label depending on how fast you work and how responsive your software is.

With batch printing, most of those steps are eliminated or amortized across the entire batch. You verify addresses in bulk — most platforms flag address issues automatically. You set shipping rules that assign the correct service based on weight, dimensions, and destination. You enter weights once or import them from your scale. The per-label time drops to three to five seconds of actual effort.

For a business shipping 50 orders per day, the one-at-a-time method takes 45 to 75 minutes. Batch printing takes 10 to 15 minutes. That is 30 to 60 minutes saved every single day, or roughly two to four hours per week. Over a year, that is 100 to 200 hours — enough time to develop a new product line, improve your marketing, or simply stop working an extra hour every evening.

At 100 orders per day, the savings double. At 200 orders, batch printing is not just a time-saver — it is the difference between needing to hire another person and not.

Setting Up Batch Printing

Most shipping platforms support batch printing, but the quality of the implementation varies. The key features to look for are automatic service selection (rules that assign the cheapest or fastest carrier based on package characteristics), address validation that flags problems before you print (rather than after, when you have to void and reprint), weight import from a connected USB scale, and the ability to print to a thermal label printer without going through a print dialog every time.

Thermal printers are strongly recommended over inkjet or laser printers for shipping labels. A thermal printer like the DYMO 4XL or Rollo produces labels instantly with no ink to replace, no alignment issues, and no cutting or peeling sheets. The upfront cost of 150 to 300 dollars pays for itself within weeks if you ship more than a few orders per day.

Configure your printer as the default output for your shipping software so that clicking print sends labels directly to the thermal printer without a dialog box or preview step. Every unnecessary click multiplied by dozens of labels per day adds up.

Shipping Rules That Make Batch Printing Smarter

The real power of batch printing comes from shipping rules — automated logic that assigns the correct service and carrier to each order based on criteria you define. Good shipping rules eliminate manual decision-making from the label creation process entirely.

Common rules include weight-based service selection (orders under one pound use First-Class, one to five pounds use Ground Advantage, over five pounds compare UPS and FedEx Ground), value-based insurance triggers (orders over 100 dollars automatically get signature confirmation or additional insurance), and destination-based carrier selection (West Coast orders use OnTrac if available, all others use USPS).

Platform-specific rules can go further. Some platforms like atoship automatically rate-shop every order against all configured carriers and select the cheapest option that meets your delivery timeframe requirements. This means your batch print is not just fast — it is also cost-optimized, because every label in the batch represents the best available rate for that specific shipment.

The Match-and-Apply Workflow

After printing a batch of labels, you need to match each label to the correct package. The most efficient approach is to sort your packages by order number before printing, then print labels in the same order. As labels come out of the printer, they match up sequentially with the packages in your staging area.

Some operations use a scan-and-apply workflow instead: print all labels, then scan each label's barcode to pull up the corresponding order on screen, verify the items, and apply the label. This adds a few seconds per package but provides a verification step that catches errors before they leave your facility.

For businesses shipping identical or near-identical products — subscription boxes, single-SKU stores, standardized gift sets — the match step is trivial because every package contains the same thing. For businesses with diverse product catalogs where each order is unique, the scan-and-verify approach is worth the small time investment.

When One-at-a-Time Still Makes Sense

Batch printing is not optimal for every situation. Custom or made-to-order products where each item is produced individually often work better with a one-at-a-time workflow, because the label is printed as part of the production process for that specific item. Similarly, fragile or high-value items that require individual quality inspection before shipping may benefit from a per-item label process that includes the inspection step.

But for the vast majority of e-commerce operations — standard products, consistent packaging, predictable shipping services — batch printing is faster, cheaper, and less error-prone than printing labels one at a time. If you are shipping more than ten orders per day and not using batch printing, you are leaving time and money on the table.