The Amazon Shipping Label Format, Explained Page by Page

You have downloaded thousands of them. The "Print Labels" page in Amazon Seller Central gives you a PDF — usually in ATSPL (Amazon Transportation Service Private Limited) format — and that PDF is where every dispatch begins. But what is actually printed on it, why is it laid out the way it is, and which parts can you safely crop away?

The two-section layout

A standard Amazon A4 PDF has two stacked sections per order:

1. Top ~42%: the shipping label itself — courier zone, AWB, sender, recipient, barcodes.
2. Bottom ~58%: the tax invoice / bill of supply with line items, GST breakup, and order ID.

Some sellers also see a third "manifest" page, but that is a daily summary, not a per-order page. The shipping label section is always the upper portion of page one for that order, and the invoice always sits beneath or on the next page.

Anatomy of the shipping label

1. Courier zone (top band)

The colored band at the very top tells the courier system who fulfills this order. Common values: ATSPL (Amazon Shipping), FBA, or third-party like Delhivery / BlueDart / XpressBees when you select Easy Ship.

2. AWB / Tracking number

The 1D barcode below the courier band encodes the Air Waybill. This is the courier's primary key for the parcel — it is scanned at every hub. If this barcode is unreadable, the parcel gets quarantined. Never crop or shrink it below 38mm wide.

3. Ship-from / Ship-to addresses

Both addresses appear below the AWB. Amazon masks the customer phone on the label with a proxy number, but the address is full. Make sure your crop includes both address blocks vertically, including the pin-code line.

4. Order details strip

A single-line strip prints: order number, dispatch date, weight, and dimensions. Couriers verify this against the manifest at pickup.

5. Customer-facing 2D barcode

A QR or DataMatrix code at the bottom-right encodes a courier-internal payload (used for sortation belts at hubs). This cannot be cropped.

Anatomy of the invoice section

The bottom half is your tax invoice. For thermal printing, you do not need this on the label, but you do need to extract a few fields from it for warehouse picking:

• ASIN — Amazon's product identifier, always 10 characters starting with B0.
• SKU — your seller SKU, used to locate stock in the warehouse.
• Product name — sanity check during packing.
• Quantity — number of units to pack.

The Ecom Insides cropper extracts all four fields automatically using on-device OCR-free text parsing. They then appear as a footer beneath each thermal label, and aggregated on a final summary page.

What you can safely crop away

For a 4×6 thermal output, you keep the entire top ~42% (the label band and barcodes) and drop the lower invoice block. The crop boundary is consistent across most ATSPL PDFs because Amazon generates them from a fixed template. The only variation is whether the invoice starts on the same page or rolls onto a continuation page. For the hands-on steps, see how to crop Amazon shipping labels for a thermal printer.

The "extra invoice page" problem

Sellers often complain that printing 50 orders gives them 100+ pages because each label is followed by a separate invoice page. On a thermal printer that wastes labels and time. The cropper detects invoice pages by checking for keywords like "Tax Invoice", "GSTIN", "HSN", and "Place of Supply", and removes them from the output entirely.

Pro tips for clean thermal output

• Always set "Fit to printable area" OFF in the print dialog — let the PDF size match the label exactly.
• Print in Actual Size at 203 DPI for the cleanest barcodes.
• Pre-flight one label before printing 100 — barcode legibility issues compound.
• Sort by SKU before printing so the picker can grab one bin at a time.