How to print Avery 5160 labels from Shopify
Avery 5160 (and its inkjet twin, 8160) is the most common address-label sheet in North America: 30 labels per US Letter page, laid out 3 across and 10 down. Each label is 66.675 mm × 25.4 mm (2⅝“ × 1“). It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, and it’s a perfectly good barcode label for shelf and bin tags.
The tricky part isn’t the printing. It’s getting your Shopify product data onto the sheet at the exact size the sheet expects.
Why the size matters so much
A label sheet is a physical grid. If your PDF is even a millimetre off per label, the error accumulates: by row ten, your barcodes are straddling the die-cut gaps and half of them won’t scan.
This is why “print to PDF from a web page” usually fails. Browsers scale content to fit the paper, and any scaling at all changes the physical dimensions. What you want is a PDF where 66.675 mm is genuinely 66.675 mm.
Step 1: make sure your variants have barcodes
Shopify has a barcode field on every product variant, but it’s empty by default. Before you can print anything scannable, each variant you want a label for needs a value in it.
You can type them in by hand under Products → (product) → Variants → Barcode, or bulk-assign them. Two rules worth following:
- Never reuse a number. Two variants sharing a barcode means your scanner can’t tell them apart at the till.
- Don’t regenerate barcodes you’ve already printed. Labels already on your shelves become wrong the moment the number changes.
Step 2: build the sheet layout
For Avery 5160, the layout you need is:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Page size | US Letter (215.9 × 279.4 mm) |
| Labels per sheet | 30 (3 columns × 10 rows) |
| Label size | 66.675 × 25.4 mm |
| Top margin | 12.7 mm |
| Side margin | 4.76 mm |
| Horizontal pitch | 68.26 mm |
| Vertical pitch | 25.4 mm |
At that size you have room for a product name, a barcode, and a price — not much more. Keep the barcode at least 15 mm wide and give it a few millimetres of quiet space on each side, or scanners will struggle.
Step 3: print at 100% scale
This is where most people lose. In the print dialog:
- Set scale to 100% or Actual size.
- Turn off “Fit to page”, “Shrink oversized pages”, and any “Scale to fit media” option.
- Print a single test sheet on plain paper first and hold it against a real label sheet up to the light.
If the test sheet lines up, you’re done. If it’s off by a consistent amount, that’s a printer offset — most printers pull paper a millimetre or two off from where the driver thinks. Measure the offset and shift the whole layout by that amount rather than nudging individual labels.
Starting from a partly-used sheet
Nobody uses exactly 30 labels. If you peeled 7 off last week, you want the next run to start at position 8 — otherwise you’re printing onto bare backing paper and wasting the rest of the sheet.
Any tool you use for this should let you pick the starting position on the first sheet. It’s a small feature that saves a surprising amount of label stock.
Doing this with LabelForge
LabelForge has Avery 5160/8160 as a built-in preset, so the layout above is already configured. You select the products you want, it pulls the barcodes and prices straight from your Shopify inventory, and it generates a vector PDF at exact physical size. There’s a position picker for partly-used sheets and a calibration setting for printer offset.
It’s free for 30 labels a month, which is exactly one Avery sheet — enough to test the whole flow before you decide anything.