An order insert is the small printed card that rides along in the box, separate from the packing slip that lists what shipped. The slip is a document; the insert is a marketing decision. Done well, it turns a one-time buyer into a repeat customer for a few cents per order. Done carelessly, it is a bent card at the bottom of the mailer that nobody reads. Specifying one properly is a short sequence of decisions, and taking them in order keeps the program cheap to run and easy to measure.

Decide what the insert is for before you design it

An insert should have one job, and the job dictates everything downstream. The common formats each map to a different goal. A discount offer, often the single most effective insert, drives the second purchase with a credit, a percentage off, or free shipping. A thank-you card or personal note is the simplest and least expensive option and does the most for brand warmth, especially when it uses the customer’s name. A tips-and-tricks or care card reduces support tickets and returns by teaching the customer how to use what they bought. A review or social request converts a happy unboxing into public proof; one skincare brand, Frank Body, is frequently cited as having grown to hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers partly on the back of insert prompts. Product samples cross-sell an adjacent line, and a small unexpected gift buys goodwill through simple reciprocity. Trying to do all of these on one card produces a cluttered insert that accomplishes none of them, so pick the primary goal first and let the second message, if any, be clearly subordinate.

Size the card to the package, not the other way around

The right size is the largest card that still lies flat in your shipment without folding. A card that has to be creased to fit reads as an afterthought, and a card swimming in a big box gets lost. Discount offers are frequently printed at business-card size because it is the most economical format and slips into any mailer. Postcard and five-by-seven formats give a thank-you note room to breathe in a medium box, while a half-sheet or rack card suits a larger carton or a card that has to carry care instructions and a diagram. Start from the interior dimension of your most common mailer or box and work back to a trim size that sits inside it comfortably.

Treat those dimensions as nominal trim sizes and confirm the exact figures with your printer before building artwork, since trim can vary by a sixteenth of an inch and bleed requirements differ between shops. If you ship in more than one box size, it is usually cheaper to standardize on one insert that fits the smallest common package than to run a separate size for each, because the setup and the short-run economics favor a single job.

Choose a stock that matches the message

Weight signals intent. A flimsy insert undercuts a premium product, while heavy card on a disposable coupon wastes money. Lightweight text stocks around 118 to 148 gsm, roughly 80 to 100 pound text, suit a foldable flyer or a care sheet that carries a lot of copy. For a card that should feel substantial in the hand, cover stocks are the norm: a 12-point board lands near 268 gsm, a 14-point near 305 gsm, and a 16-point premium card around 350 gsm. Fourteen-point is the workhorse standard for a card that has to feel like it means something, and sixteen-point is the step up when the brand is positioned as a luxury.

Two cautions keep the stock decision honest. First, these gsm figures are approximations, because an uncoated sheet bulks up thicker than a coated one at the same weight, and a laminate or soft-touch finish adds caliper on top; ask for a physical sample or a drawdown before committing a large run. Second, heavier is not automatically better. A brand that leans into recycled, unbleached kraft aesthetics can communicate more with a lighter uncoated stock than with a glossy heavyweight, so let the material match the story rather than defaulting to the thickest board on the menu.

Static or variable: printing and personalization

The print method follows from whether every card is identical. If the insert is the same for every order, a single static design printed in bulk is by far the cheapest route, and the per-unit cost drops sharply with quantity, which is why a static thank-you card can cost a fraction of a cent at volume. The moment you want the card to change per order, a printed customer name, a unique discount code, a product-specific care tip, you are into variable-data or digital on-demand printing, which costs more per piece but unlocks personalization and per-order tracking. A practical middle path many brands use is a static card design with a single generic code or QR, printed in bulk, which captures most of the benefit at the static price. Decide which of these three you need before you request quotes, because the cost curves are very different and mixing them up leads to sticker shock.

Build in a way to measure it

An insert program you cannot measure is a guess you keep paying for. The cleanest way to know whether the card works is to make its action trackable: a discount code that exists only on the insert, a QR that lands on a dedicated URL, or a review link with its own tag. Redemptions and scans then tell you the real return rather than a vibe. This is also where a return-oriented insert earns its keep, since a meaningful share of shoppers, reported by Statista at around a third, say they want a return label included with the original order, and giving them a clear returns path on the insert can lower the support burden even though it feels counterintuitive to make returning easier. Once one code is running, test a second offer against it, keep the winner, and retire the loser. That single habit, changing one variable at a time and reading the codes, turns the insert from a nice-to-have into a line item that pays for itself.

The packing slip is the one printed thing that lands in a customer’s hands after they buy from you, and for most brands it does nothing but list what is in the box. That is a missed job. A slip designed with returns in mind can settle the most common post-purchase question before the customer reaches for their phone, and given how expensive returns have become, the paper in the box is one of the cheapest places to intervene.

Roughly one in five online orders comes back across all of retail, and the rate is far worse in some categories. This walkthrough covers how to design a packing slip that guides a return cleanly, nudges an exchange where one is possible, and spares your support inbox the flood of “how do I send this back” messages that follow every shipment.

Start from the real cost of a return

Before designing anything, it helps to see what a return actually costs, because that number is what justifies spending an extra field or two on the slip. Published 2026 benchmarks put the overall U.S. ecommerce return rate near 19 to 20 percent, with apparel and accessories at 30 to 40 percent and footwear at 25 to 35 percent, while electronics sit lower at 8 to 10 percent and beauty lower still. In-store returns, by contrast, run a milder 5 to 9 percent, which tells you the online channel carries a structural disadvantage the slip can help offset.

The processing cost per return is the other half of the math. Reverse-logistics estimates land around $10 to $20 to process a returned general-merchandise item and $30 to $65 for electronics that need testing and refurbishment, and none of that includes the margin lost on the sale itself. When a return costs that much to handle, a slip that converts even a small share of returns into exchanges, or heads off a mis-routed package, pays for its own design many times over. And it matters most in January, when post-holiday returns spike 30 to 50 percent and every avoided support ticket counts double.

Put the return path on the slip itself

The single most useful change is to print the return path directly on the slip rather than assuming the customer will hunt for it on your site. That means the order number in large, unambiguous type, the date the return window closes stated as an actual calendar date rather than “within 30 days,” and a short URL or QR code that opens your returns portal pre-filled with that order. The goal is that a customer holding the slip never has to type an order number, dig through email, or guess when their window ends. Every one of those small frictions is a reason to email support instead, and each one is avoidable in ink.

Printing a firm calendar date does something subtle beyond convenience: it removes the ambiguity that generates disputes. “Within 30 days of delivery” invites an argument about which day counts; “return by September 11, 2026” does not. If your system can merge that date onto each slip at print or pack time, it is worth the setup.

Design the slip to nudge an exchange

A return and an exchange cost you very differently. A refund is lost revenue plus reverse-logistics cost; an exchange keeps the sale and only adds the shipping. A well-built slip tilts customers toward the exchange without hiding the refund option. The practical move is to present the exchange as the default first step on the return instructions, with wording that assumes a size or color swap is the likely reason, since for apparel and footwear it usually is. Offering store credit at a small bonus, stated plainly on the slip, is another lever that turns a would-be refund into retained revenue.

This is also where a personalized note earns its place. A slip that addresses the customer by name and references the specific product reads as service rather than paperwork, and customers extend more patience to a brand that feels attentive. The return instructions can share the same panel as a short thank-you without the slip feeling cluttered.

Choose a format that becomes part of the return

The physical construction of the slip can carry weight here. A perforated slip lets the customer tear off a return section to include in the box while keeping their own record, and a duplicate or carbonless format gives both the warehouse and the customer a matching copy without a second print run. For brands that run their own returns, a slip with a detachable, pre-addressed return portion turns the document itself into the first step of the process rather than a thing to be set aside and lost.

Format also has to survive the warehouse and the round trip. A slip that will be handled, folded into a mailer, and possibly sent back should be printed on a stock heavy enough to stay legible, which is usually a bond weight rather than thin copy paper. The exact weight is a judgment call based on how the slip is handled, but the principle is simple: a slip that smears or tears defeats the purpose of printing the return path on it at all.

Specify it so it prints right the first time

Turning all of this into an order comes down to a few decisions. Fix the trim size to something that fits your mailers and your printer’s stock, commonly a half-letter or A5 slip for most parcels. Decide which fields merge per order, the order number, the return-by date, and the portal link or code, versus which are printed the same on every slip, such as your logo and the standing return policy. Then match the print method to the volume: variable data that changes with every order points toward digital printing, while a large run of identical branded slips can go offset for a lower unit cost.

The chart above is the reason to bother with any of this. When processing a single returned item runs from $10 into the tens of dollars, the packing slip is a rounding error by comparison, and any design choice that converts a return into an exchange, or simply stops one confused email, returns far more than it costs. Decide the fields by the job the slip has to do after the box is opened, spec the format and stock to survive that job, and the paper in the box starts working for you instead of just riding along.

A finished order usually leaves the building with three or four pieces of paper attached to it, and it is easy to treat them as interchangeable. They are not. A packing slip, a commercial invoice, a shipping label, and, on international freight, an export packing list each answer a different question for a different reader. Mixing them up is how a customer ends up seeing wholesale pricing they were never supposed to, or how a pallet sits in a customs queue because the paperwork was thin. This guide walks through what each document is for, what belongs on it, and where the honest overlaps are.

What a packing slip is, and what it deliberately leaves out

A packing slip is a contents manifest for one specific parcel. Its job is to let two people confirm the same thing: the warehouse picker checking that the box holds what the order called for, and the customer opening it to confirm nothing is missing. To do that it lists the item names, SKUs, and quantities, the order number, and the ship-to and sold-to details. What it does not carry is money. A packing slip normally shows no unit prices, no tax, no subtotal, and no payment terms, and that omission is intentional rather than an oversight.

The pricing exclusion matters most in two situations. The first is drop-shipping and third-party fulfillment, where the person packing the box is not the person who sold the goods, and printing the retail price would hand the end customer your supplier relationship. The second is gifting, where a recipient should not see what the sender paid. Because the packing slip is the one document that reliably travels inside the box, it is also the piece most brands treat as a branding surface, but its core contract is verification, not billing.

Packing slip vs. invoice: the money question

The invoice is the financial twin of the packing slip. Where the slip proves what shipped, the invoice records what is owed. It repeats the item lines but adds unit prices, discounts, tax, a subtotal and total, payment method or terms, and often a company logo and remit-to information. In consumer e-commerce the two frequently look similar because the same order data feeds both, but they are read by different people at different moments: the packing slip by whoever opens the box, the invoice by an accounts-payable clerk or the buyer’s records. For most direct-to-consumer orders the customer has already paid at checkout, so a separate invoice is optional and the packing slip stands in as the human-readable summary. In business-to-business selling, where terms like net 30 are common, the invoice is a distinct and legally meaningful document that should never be reduced to a slip.

A practical test settles most disputes about which is which: if the document is meant to make someone pay, it is an invoice; if it is meant to help someone check a box against an order, it is a packing slip. When a single template tries to do both, it usually does one of them badly.

The shipping label and the bill of lading play a different game

A shipping label is not really a paperwork document at all in the accounting sense; it is a set of routing instructions for the carrier. It carries the destination and return addresses, a tracking barcode, the service level, package weight, and a routing or zone code that the carrier’s scanners read. It says nothing about what is inside beyond weight, and it is emphatically not customer verification. The label answers “where does this go and who moves it,” while the packing slip answers “what is in it.”

On freight, a third document enters: the bill of lading. A bill of lading is a contract of carriage and a receipt issued by the carrier, and it governs the legal relationship between shipper and freight company. It is not a substitute for a packing slip either. A pallet can carry a bill of lading on the outside for the carrier and a packing slip or packing list inside describing the cartons, and each serves its own audience. Treating the label or the bill of lading as “the paperwork” and skipping the contents document is a common way for a receiving dock to sign for a shipment it cannot actually reconcile.

When a full export packing list replaces the slip

For international shipments the humble packing slip grows up into an export packing list, and the extra detail is not optional decoration. A customs officer needs to reconcile the physical shipment against the paperwork, so an export packing list typically adds gross and net weights, carton dimensions, the number of packages and how items are distributed across them, country of origin, and Harmonized System tariff codes. It travels with the shipment, usually attached externally or bundled with the freight documents rather than tucked inside a single box, and it works alongside the commercial invoice, which supplies the declared values. Thin or mismatched paperwork here has a concrete cost: shipments held for inspection, requests for clarification, and days added to a lead time that was quoted as though clearance were instant.

The distinction between a domestic packing slip and an export packing list is really a distinction of audience. A domestic slip is written for a customer and a warehouse. An export packing list is written for a customs authority and a freight forwarder, and it assumes the reader will physically weigh and measure what it describes.

Getting the fields right before you print

The cheapest time to fix a document problem is before the run, not after a thousand slips are boxed. Decide first who each printed piece is for, then let that reader dictate the fields. If customers will see the packing slip, keep pricing off it and make the item descriptions readable rather than internal codes. If the same order needs a paying invoice, generate it as its own document with the financial fields intact. If anything is crossing a border, plan for an export packing list with weights, dimensions, and tariff codes from the start rather than upgrading a domestic slip at the dock.

None of this requires exotic software. It requires being deliberate about the fact that a shipment usually needs more than one document, and that each one is answering a different question. Get the audiences straight and the fields follow; blur them, and you get the classic failures, a customer who saw a cost they should not have, or a pallet waiting on a form that was never filled in.

A packing slip is the one document your customer is guaranteed to hold. It rides inside the box, and the moment it is opened it becomes the reference the recipient uses to check that everything they ordered actually arrived. A good template makes that check effortless and quietly reinforces the brand; a sloppy one generates support tickets and returns. Whether you are building a template from scratch in a spreadsheet, configuring the one your e-commerce platform generates, or handing artwork to a printer, the questions are the same: which fields belong on it, which deliberately do not, and how the whole thing should be sized and laid out. Work through those and you have a template that serves the warehouse and the customer at once.

The fields a packing slip should always carry

Start with the header. Every slip needs a clear order or reference number and the order date, because that number is what ties the physical box back to the order in your system when anything goes wrong. Add the ship-to address and a line of contact information, and include your own return address or business details so the recipient knows at a glance who sent it. The body of the slip is an itemized list of what is in the box: each line showing a product description, its SKU or UPC, and the quantity. The single most useful detail here is to show quantity ordered alongside quantity shipped as two separate columns rather than one. When those numbers differ, the customer can see immediately that an item is short rather than assuming the order is complete and wrong.

The field that separates a professional slip from a bare list is a place for backordered or out-of-stock items. Listing what did not ship, with a note that it is to follow, prevents the most common post-delivery complaint, which is a customer counting the box against their confirmation email and concluding you made a mistake. A short free-text area at the bottom for a thank-you line, a discount code, or return instructions rounds it out and costs nothing to include.

What to leave off, and why the invoice is a different document

The most important thing a packing slip omits is money. Prices, line totals, payment terms, method of payment, and tax do not belong on it. That is not an oversight; it is the whole distinction between a packing slip and an invoice. A packing slip verifies what physically shipped and goes to whoever receives the box. An invoice is the financial record of what was charged and goes to whoever pays the bill, who is often not the same person. Keeping prices off the slip matters practically as well as conceptually. Gift orders shipped directly to a recipient should not reveal what the buyer spent, and business deliveries frequently go to a loading dock or a front desk where pricing has no business being visible. If you ever do need one combined document, some businesses issue a packing-slip-and-invoice hybrid, but the default and the safer choice is to keep the two apart.

Size and format the slip for the box, not the page

Templates default to a full US Letter sheet at 8.5 by 11 inches, and that is fine for large or document-heavy shipments, but it is often bigger than the parcel needs. A half sheet at 8.5 by 5.5 inches, or an A5-scale slip, holds a normal order comfortably and wastes less paper and space. The dimension that actually matters is how the slip fits your packing-list pouch, the clear adhesive envelope stuck to the outside or tucked just inside the carton. Those pouches come in a handful of standard sizes, commonly around 4.5 by 5.5, 5.5 by 7, 7 by 10, and up to 9.5 by 12 inches, and the listed dimension is the outside, so the usable interior is roughly half an inch smaller on each side. The rule of thumb is to choose a pouch about an inch larger than your folded slip so it slides in and out without tearing.

Placement is part of the format decision. A pouch on the outside of the carton lets a warehouse or a customer read the slip without opening the box, which speeds up receiving and returns, but it exposes the slip to weather, so a fully enclosed adhesive pouch matters there. Tucking the slip inside keeps the exterior clean and the contents private, which suits gift and direct-to-consumer orders. High-volume operations sometimes run a two-part or duplicate slip so one copy travels with the goods and one stays with the picker as a record, which is worth considering if your team reconciles shipments by hand rather than by scan.

From template to printed slip

Most sellers generate packing slips automatically, and the template is usually editable. On common e-commerce platforms the slip is driven by a template you can customize, so the work is arranging the fields above, dropping in your logo, and confirming that the ship-to block and the ordered-versus-shipped columns populate correctly from a real order before you print a thousand of them. Print a test slip and read it as a customer would, checking that nothing important is cut off at the margins and that a scanned barcode, if you use one, sits in a flat, quiet area of the layout. If you are ordering pre-printed slips rather than printing on demand, the same template thinking applies, with the branded and static elements printed in advance and the order-specific data added at pack time.

A quick template checklist

Before you lock a template, run it against a short list. It should show an order number and date, a ship-to address, and your return details; an itemized table with description, SKU, quantity ordered, and quantity shipped; a clearly marked section for anything backordered; and a small branded footer for a message or return policy. It should show no prices, no payment details, and no tax. And it should be sized to fold cleanly into the pouch you actually use. Get those right and the packing slip does exactly what it is supposed to do: it lets the person opening the box confirm, in a few seconds and without a phone call, that you got their order right.