Sorting labels for faster picking and dispatch

Marketplaces give you labels in whatever order the orders arrived. That order is useless in a packing room. A batch of ninety labels might jump between three couriers and forty products, so whoever is packing keeps walking back to the same shelf and then has to separate parcels into courier piles at the end. Sorting labels before printing fixes both problems.

Courier piles first

Each courier picks up its own parcels, so the first split should be by courier. When labels print grouped by courier, the packed parcels stack naturally into piles and handover is quick. For Meesho, labels are grouped into Valmo, Delhivery, Shadowfax and Xpress Bees. Valmo and ValmoPlus go in the same pile because they are handed over together, but the summary counts them separately so you can match the pickup manifest.

Snapdeal is grouped by courier and then SKU. AJIO is sorted by courier and then routing code. Flipkart uses one carrier, so its labels are grouped by registered seller and then SKU, which helps if you run more than one seller account. Amazon labels are sorted by ship date first, so the most urgent orders come out on top.

Then SKU order

Within each pile, labels follow SKU order. Identical products print one after another, so a packer can pull five of the same kurta from the shelf in one go. CropMyLabel offers several sort modes:

• Courier then SKU (the default).
• SKU, which orders by design, then colour, then size.
• Colour, for catalogues where colour is the main variant.
• Size, useful when stock is shelved by size.
• Keep file order, if you want the marketplace’s original order.

Sizes on one scale

Sorting sizes alphabetically puts L before M and XL before S, which is no help to anyone. CropMyLabel sorts sizes on a single scale from smallest to largest. Letter sizes follow their natural order and equivalent names are treated as the same size, so 3XL and XXXL land together. Numeric sizes sort as numbers, so 28 comes before 30 and 100. Ranges like "30-32" and sizes like "30 IN" sort by their leading number. Free size goes at the end.

Summary pages and the pick list

Before anyone starts packing, it helps to know what the whole batch needs. CropMyLabel can add dispatch summary pages to the front of the PDF, printed on the same stock as your labels. They list every item by SKU, size and colour with the number of parcels and units, and tally parcels by courier and by seller.

The same summary is shown on screen in the summary tab, and you can download it as a CSV pick list. Open the CSV in any spreadsheet app, print it or share it with whoever pulls stock from the shelves.

A simple routine that works well: print the summary first, pick all the stock against it, then print the labels and pack in printed order. Each parcel goes straight onto its courier’s pile, and multi-item parcels are already flagged so nobody misses the second piece.