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CG - Royal Mail OBA: Creating Labels
CG - Royal Mail OBA: Creating Labels

Learn how to generate labels and the end of day Manifest for your connected Royal Mail OBA account

Chelsea Kelly avatar
Written by Chelsea Kelly
Updated over a week ago

Once you have connected your Royal Mail (OBA) account to ChannelGrabber, you will be able to start creating labels for shipments.

Creating & Printing Royal Mail Labels in ChannelGrabber

Important Note: All courier labels generated in ChannelGrabber will be 6x4" (150x100mm) which is the universal standard size, so you need to ensure that your labels or integrated invoice sheets are the correct dimensions.

To get started, please navigate to your main Orders page:

1. Select as many orders as you need using the check-box to the left of each order, or select all orders by clicking into the top check-box:

2. Click the Ship button from your actions toolbar:

3. Review Orders
If you have previously set up Shipping Aliases, then the courier and service should be automatically pre-selected based on the shipping method from the order channel. If you have not set up a Shipping Alias for one or more of the services, then you will need to select the courier and service you want to use, then click the Continue button on the top right corner of the page:

4. Finalise Label Details
You can now enter the following details for each order where applicable:

  • No. Parcels - if you are splitting an order into more than one parcel

  • Collection - the date that you intend to manifest the label and for the collection to take place.

  • Weight (kg) - the shipped weight of the order (if you have already entered weights on the Products page, then these will be pre-filled in based on the SKU of the item ordered)

  • Height, Width, Length (cm) - the total size of the order once packaged (if you have already entered dimensions on the Products page, then these will be pre-filled in based on the SKU of the item ordered)

  • Package Type - set whether the order will be a Letter, Large Letter or Parcel

  • HS Code* - the HS Tariff Code for the item being shipped and required for International shipping post-Brexit.

  • Country of Origin* - The Country in which the item was Manufactured (required for international orders post-Brexit).

  • Insurance - tick if applicable on the Service you have chosen

  • EORI Number* - This is your EORI number for international shipping, taken from from the relevant field under My Account > Company.

  • Signature - tick if applicable on the Service you have chosen (this is not required for services where the signature is a part of the service)

  • Insurance - if you selected the Insurance option you can now set the value to insure up to

  • Delivery Instructions - copy or type any instructions/requests from your buyer

* These fields will appear on any CN23 labels generated for international orders as part of the required changes to shipping introduced post-Brexit in January 2021.

Top Tip!

If you have a high volume of orders, you can set the Collection Date and Package Type in bulk for all labels at the top of the Ship interface, to save time if you have many labels that you want to manifest on a later date, or set the Package Type for:


5. Once you have selected all necessary options, you can either click the individual Create Label buttons next to each order if you want to generate the labels separately, or you can click the Create All Labels button at the top of the page, to generate all the labels at once:

This will generate labels for each of your orders, so once you see the Print Label button appear next to each order, that shows that the label is ready to print.


6. a) Printing Labels on a Label Printer
As with creating the labels, you can either print labels individually or use the Print All Labels button to create a PDF file containing all the labels so they can be printed as one big batch:


Once you have generated your label PDF file(s) in ChannelGrabber, these will download to your computer via your web browser, or open in a new tab (dependant on your browser settings), then simply send them to print on your label printer.


6. b) Printing Labels as part of an Integrated Label Invoice
If you are printing the labels as part of an integrated label invoice sheet instead of on individual labels, then once you see the Print Label button appear next to each order, that shows that the label is ready to print. Do not print yet though, as these are the labels only (not invoices).

Once all labels are created, click the Back To Orders button at the top right corner of the page:

The same batch of orders will remain selected that you just created the labels for:

For that same batch, click the Invoice button from your actions toolbar, which will generate your default invoice design for each order, and will now automatically incorporate your Royal Mail labels too:

You can ensure that any extra documents, such as your CN23 labels are printed off by enabling the setting: "Show additional shipping labels" under Settings > Template Settings.

And that's it, you're done creating and printing your Royal Mail labels in ChannelGrabber! All that remains now is to generate the end of day Manifest to validate labels created throughout the day.

ChannelGrabber Tip:

If you would like to be able to easily check which orders have had their shipping labels created from the main Orders page, you can enable the Shipping Label Created Date column on your order table (see our guide on How to Customise the Order Page for more detail on this), which will then display the time and date that your label was created next to the order for easy reference:

Generating a Royal Mail Manifest in ChannelGrabber

When you're all done with your Royal Mail labels for the day, you will then need to complete the full process by generating the Royal Mail manifest in ChannelGrabber.

When labels are created via the Royal Mail (OBA) integration they are held by our label supplier, until a Manifest has been generated. Once the Manifest has been generated, the label data will be validated and sent to Royal Mail. After this point you will no longer be able to cancel labels.

Manifest generation is a requirement to prevent additional charges from Royal Mail due to un-validated labels being processed.

Our labels suppliers perform a Clean Sweep of any outstanding Manifests each day at 10pm. Any Manifests generated by this clean sweep will be unavailable via the ChannelGrabber interface and will need to be retrieved manually by a member of the Support Team.

All you need to do to trigger the manifest is click the drop-down arrow next to the Ship button on the main Orders page and click the Manifests button, then selecting Royal Mail and clicking the Generate button:

You only need to do this once a day, after you have finished creating all the labels you need for that day, then you can print the manifest ready to hand over with your Royal Mail parcels to your collection driver.

You can also choose to Print Historic Manifests by selecting the date and time of the manifest you need, from underneath the Generate button.

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