In this article, we will be going over how you can enhance capabilities to print WooCommerce USPS Shipping labels of your online store. We will be using the ELEX Stamps.com Shipping Plugin with USPS Postage for WooCommerce and add-ons for the plugin.

Introduction:

.Printing Shipping labels is a core facet of any business’s order fulfillment process. To ship orders through a carrier like USPS, on your WooCommerce store, you need to generate shipments, package the items, and generate shipping labels. USPS mandates the products being shipped through their services needs to have shipping labels on them. Shipping Labels contain vital information about the sender address, the destination address, a barcode for tracking, and the USPS service that is used to ship that item.

Using the ELEX Stamps.com Shipping Plugin with USPS Postage for WooCommerce you can create shipments, generate packages and shipping labels right from your WooCommerce order page. While this in itself is a massive competitive advantage, using add-ons you can improve the printing capabilities even more.

Prerequisites:

We will be using the following to integrate and configure WooCommerce USPS Shipping:

1. ELEX Stamps.com Shipping Plugin with USPS Postage for WooCommerce: to integrate WooCommerce USPS shipping services and products.
2. ELEX Stamps.com USPS Auto-Generate & Email Labels Add-On automatically generate shipping labels for you, whenever an order moves to specified order status. You’ll receive a copy of the shipping label via email. You can also choose to send a copy of the shipping label & shipment tracking link to your customer’s and/or custom email address(es). In addition to this, the add-on allows you to send an email notification to shop owners when USPS fails to return real-time rates.
3. ELEX WooCommerce Stamps.com USPS Bulk Label Printing Add-On: This add on lets you generate WooCommerce USPS Shipping labels in bulk and uses the iLovePDF REST API to merge the PDFs. This helps in saving time and effort immensely.
4. ELEX WooCommerce Stamps.com-USPS Pickup Request Add-On: This add on lets adds USPS shipment pickup functionality to WooCommerce.
5. Stamps.com Account: To use the plugin and it’s add ons you need a Stamps.com account first. To connect your Stamps.com account to the plugin all you need to do is paste your account User ID and Password. You can set the plugin to be in Test mode while you try out everything. When you’re ready to print shipping labels or buy postage, you can set the API mode to Live. ELEX Stamps.com Shipping Plugin with USPS Postage for WooCommerce is a Stamps.com Approved Integration Partner

Once you have them downloaded and installed, you can proceed to configure the settings. Here are the ways you can improve the printing capabilities of your WooCommerce store using these add ons.

Bulk Printing USPS Shipping Labels:

Bulk printing USPS Shipping labels can improve the efficiency of your fulfillment process immensely. This is where the ELEX WooCommerce Stamps.com USPS Bulk Label Printing Add-On comes in. Using the plugin, you can generate shipping labels for multiple orders. The add-on pulls all the shipping labels you might have already generated and signals the core plugin to generate shipping labels for those that don’t. The ELEX WooCommerce Stamps.com USPS Bulk Label Printing Add-On features several intuitive features that will surely make your shipping label generation and printing process a breeze.

Once installed and activated you can easily access the settings from your WordPress DashBoard. The add on features two methods by which you can select the orders that you wish to include in the consolidated file. By Order IDs and By Date Range. 

You can also choose which orders’ shipping labels get included in the bulk pdf file. Setting the Select Method to By Date Range will prompt you to set a date range. All orders generated in that period are included in the consolidated PDF

Or you can even pick and choose the orders you wish to include in your consolidated Shipping Label PDF. Setting the Select Method to By Order IDs will prompt you to choose the orders you wish to include in the consolidated shipping label file. 

Automating USPS Shipping Label Creation

Using the ELEX Stamps.com USPS Auto-Generate & Email Labels Add-On you can configure custom emails to be generated and sent to customers based on the status of the order at that time. What’s more, the email can be sent to your customers, yourself or any other email address of your choosing. 

The email notifications contain the shipping label and a convenient tracking URL. Note that the shipping labels are generated by the ELEX Stamps.com Shipping Plugin with USPS Postage for WooCommerce. 

Bulk Printing USPS e-VS Shipping Labels:

If you ship in high volume and are a USPS Electronic Verification System approved vendor, you can use the ELEX WooCommerce USPS Shipping Plugin with Print Label. It features seamless integration of e-VS systems and lets you create bulk e-VS shipments, generates USPS e-VS shipping labels and SCAN forms as well.

Additionally, using the ELEX WooCommerce USPS e-VS Bulk Label Printing Add-On you can create consolidated PDF files containing multiple shipping labels for multiple orders.

This add-on works only with ELEX WooCommerce USPS Shipping Plugin with Print Label (a USPS e-VS Electronic Verification System Pre-certified Vendor plugin) and has intuitive features that help you handle the bulk printing of shipping labels very very easily. This add on lets you select the orders whose shipping label you wish to include in the consolidated pdf in two ways. The first method involves individually selecting the orders by Order ID.

The second method requires you to set a date range for which all generated shipping labels are included in the consolidated shipping labels pdf. 

Schedule USPS Pickups:

Using the ELEX WooCommerce Stamps.com-USPS Pickup Request Add-On lets you request a pickup from Stamps.com USPS. USPS personnel will then come to your store location or any other address, to gather the packages. Pickups are free of charge as long as at least one shipment is being shipping using USPS Priority Mail.

The add on lets you place automatic and manual pickup requests. Using manual scheduling you’ll need to specify the number of packages and the service being used.

The automatic scheduling option pulls this information from the order details. 

Once the pickup has been scheduled, the add on displays all the relevant information like the order, weight, and the number of packages in one convenient window. Scheduling pickups can help you improve the efficiency of your WooCommerce Store fulfillment. Add to this the bulk shipment generation ability from the core plugin and you have got an intuitive, efficient solution for handling high volume shipments cost effectively.

Conclusion:

Improving the shipping label printing capabilities of your WooCommerce store is one of the most important steps in making your fulfillment process more efficient. ELEX Stamps.com Shipping Plugin with USPS Postage for WooCommerce is a complete shipping solution to integrate WooCommerce USPS Shipping and let you print USPS Shipping labels from WooCommerce itself. The ELEX Stamps.com USPS Auto-Generate & Email Labels Add-On lets you set up USPS shipping labels to be generated automatically depending on the order status. Moreover, you can email this autogenerated label to your customers and automate this process as well. ELEX WooCommerce Stamps.com USPS Bulk Label Printing Add-On lets you generate one consolidated PDF containing multiple shipping labels. This simplifies the USPS shipping label generation of your all your WooCommerce orders. You can download the plugin for free, here. Here are some frequently asked questions regarding the plugin and its add ons for further reading.