Labels

Use the label API to return shipping labels for your parcels. The label printing stage is the last stage before sending the booking to a carrier.

The label API also confirms which carrier your order is booked with, and provides the consignment or article details required by the carrier. Labels are carrier-specific, and must be generated with the correct information that each individual carrier needs to be able to transport the order to the right place.

You can use the label API to print:

  • A6 PDF shipping labels
  • A4 picking slips
  • ZPL labels
  • A4 dangerous goods documents
  • A4 Commercial invoice documents

When your order has had a label printed, it’s ready for dispatch.

When you are ready to label order, use a GET request with the order number to retrieve the label. If the request is successful, you receive a response from the label endpoint with a link to the label, which you can then send to your local printer.

The labels are stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are available for retrieval for up to 156 hours. The returned label URL is in this format:

shippit-web-production.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com

For labels created before June 2025, the URL format is:

shippit-web-production.s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com

If you need to add these URLs to a firewall allowlist, see the IP address and firewalls section.

IMPORTANT: You can only retrieve labelling information for an order after it’s processed and allocated to a courier, which can take some time after the order has been placed. If the label isn’t ready, you receive a 422 Unprocessable response.

Label latency

When you create an order, producing the label is the final step in the process. The steps in the process to create an order are:

  1. Send a request to the order API to retrieve carrier options, which queries a range of external carrier APIs.
  2. Allocate the order to a carrier based on allocation settings, and receive a 200 response from the external carrier API.
  3. Send a request to the label API to create the label as a PDF file, and store the file in cloud storage.
  4. Retrieve the label from cloud storage, and send it to a printer.

Each of these steps takes time to process, with some steps taking longer than others. For example, the order request and allocation steps can take some time because they need to interact with external carrier APIs.

There are a range of factors to take into account when measuring label creation latency. Some of these things are within your control to adjust, and others are not.

  • Carrier selection
  • Freight type
  • Package allocation
  • Network traffic

Shippit is constantly working on ways to improve the speed of these APIs, and how they work with external carrier APIs, so you might find that your label latency improves over time.