Avery 5160, L7160 or Dymo roll: label sizes for Shopify barcodes

The question arrives the week a store starts receiving stock properly: which labels do I buy? There are two honest answers. If you already own a label printer, buy the roll it takes. If you do not, buy a box of sheet labels for the office printer you already have and decide about a dedicated printer after a few hundred labels. Either way the choice narrows to five sizes that Restock Ops has presets for, and they are not interchangeable. A barcode that scans first time on a 38 mm tall label can be a stripe of grey on a 12.7 mm one.

This post goes through the five presets one at a time, with the actual dimensions the print sheet uses, what fits on each, and the printer dialog settings that make the labels land on the stickers rather than next to them. It assumes you print from a receipt, which is how labels are generated in Restock Ops: you receive a purchase order, open the receipt, press Print labels, and the quantity per line defaults to what was delivered. The purchase order labels post covers that flow and how the barcode type is chosen; this one is about the paper.

What a label has to hold

You pick which fields print: product title, variant, SKU, barcode and price, in that order from top to bottom. The title gets at most two lines and is cut after that. The barcode is the flexible element: it takes whatever vertical space is left after the text lines, up to a ceiling of 45 percent of the label height, and never less than 6 mm. That one rule decides most of what follows. Every line of text you switch on is taken out of the bars.

Labels shorter than 20 mm switch to a compact style: thinner padding and a smaller base font, 2.4 mm instead of 3 mm for the title. Only one of the five presets is that short. The rest print at the normal size, where the title is 3 mm, the price is 3.6 mm bold, and variant and SKU are about 2.5 mm, which is readable at arm's length but not from across a shop.

The five presets, measured

The barcode height column is the ceiling, not a promise. It is what you get when the text above it is short. Switch on all five fields on a 5160 and the two title lines, the variant and the SKU eat into the 11.4 mm and the bars shrink to fit. The field set column is the combination that keeps the barcode at or near its ceiling.

Avery 5160 and 8160: the default for a reason

Thirty per Letter sheet, one inch tall, and sold in every office supply shop in North America. 5160 is the laser version and 8160 the inkjet one; the layout is identical, which is why they share a preset. The sheet has a half inch top margin, three columns with an eighth of an inch between them, and no vertical gap between rows, and the print sheet positions every label from those numbers.

At 25.4 mm tall there is room for a two line title, the barcode at full height and a bold price underneath. That is the retail shelf label most small stores want. Add the variant line if you sell sizes or colours; drop the SKU, since the scanner reads the barcode and nobody reads a SKU off a shelf.

One inch is also the height where a 13 digit EAN scans reliably from a handheld or a phone camera. The nominal width of an EAN-13 is about 37 mm, and the 62 mm of usable width on this label leaves it at or above nominal size with quiet zones intact.

Avery 5167 and 8167: eighty tiny labels

Half an inch tall is small. This is the only preset that triggers the compact style, and even then the maths is tight: 12.7 mm of height, 1.6 mm of it padding, a 6 mm barcode floor, which leaves about 5 mm for text. In practice that is the barcode and one line, either the price or the SKU, and nothing else. Switch on the title as well and it will print, but the bars will be at their 6 mm minimum and the title will be clipped to what fits.

Where 5167 earns its place is jewellery, cosmetics, small parts and anything with no flat surface bigger than a thumbnail. Eighty per sheet also makes it the cheapest label per unit by a distance. If your scanner is a modern 2D imager it will read a 6 mm Code 128 without complaint; older laser scanners are fussier about short bars, so test one sheet before you print a thousand.

Avery L7160: the A4 one

Outside North America the office printer takes A4, and the 5160 layout does not fit on it. L7160 is the usual equivalent: 21 labels, 63.5 by 38.1 mm, three columns of seven. It is also the most generous label of the five. At 38 mm tall every field fits with the barcode at 17 mm, which is bigger than most supermarket labels, and you can afford a long product title without it crowding the bars.

The margins are specific: 15.1 mm from the top of the sheet, 7.2 mm from the left, 2.5 mm between columns. Avery sells several 21 per sheet layouts with slightly different margins under other codes, and a sheet from another brand that says 63.5 × 38.1 is usually, but not always, the same grid. If a test print drifts a millimetre per row, the paper is not L7160 even if the stickers are the same size.

Dymo 30252 and 30336: one label per page

A Dymo LabelWriter is a thermal printer that takes a roll and feeds one label at a time. The print sheet handles that by making the page exactly the size of the label: 89 by 28.6 mm for the 30252 address roll, 54 by 25.4 mm for the 30336 multipurpose roll, with no margin, one label per page, and a page break after each. Your browser then sends a document with one page per label and the printer feeds one sticker per page.

30252 is wide and short. The width is the asset: 85 mm for the bars means an EAN-13 well above nominal size, and there is room for the title on one line next to a two line variant. It is the better choice for products with long names or many variants. 30336 is close to an Avery 5160 in shape, a touch narrower, and suits the same title, barcode, price set.

The driver matters more than the preset here. Dymo's print driver picks the label from the page size the browser sends, so with the page set to the label's dimensions it should select the right roll on its own. If it prints two labels for one or leaves a blank between them, the driver has a different label selected than the one loaded; fix it in the printer's own settings rather than in the browser.

Printer dialog settings that matter

Print one page on plain paper first, hold it over a label sheet against a window, and look at the bottom row. The bottom row is where a scaling error shows up. If the top row is right and the bottom row is low, the scale is off, not the margins.

• Scale: 100 percent, or Actual size. Never Fit to page. The sheet is positioned in millimetres and any scaling moves every label a little further off its sticker the further down the page it is.
• Paper size: Letter for 5160 and 5167, A4 for L7160, the label size for the Dymo rolls. If the dialog shows the wrong paper, the print will be centred on the wrong page and the top rows will be off.
• Margins: the print sheet sets page margins to zero. Leave the browser on Default or None; a forced margin shifts the whole grid.
• Headers and footers: off. Chrome and Edge print the page title and URL by default and that pushes the sheet down.
• Background graphics: not needed. The dashed outlines you see on screen are a preview aid and do not print.

A sheet with labels already used

Sheet labels get used a few at a time, and the half used sheet is the one you reach for. The print form has a field called Skip used labels on the first sheet. Enter how many stickers are missing and the first labels are left blank. The count runs across each row and then down, left to right, top to bottom, so on a 5160 with the top row gone you enter 3, and with the top row and the first sticker of the second row gone you enter 4. The maximum is one less than a full sheet, since skipping an entire sheet is the same as not loading it.

The skip applies to the first page only. If a print run spans three sheets, the second and third start at the first sticker. And feed the used sheet carefully: a sheet with stickers peeled off has exposed adhesive on the backing, and a laser printer's fuser is hot enough to lift the remaining labels. Most label makers say to run a partly used sheet once; after that, recycle it.

Choosing in one paragraph

Letter office printer: 5160, with 5167 only for things too small to take a one inch label. A4 office printer: L7160. A Dymo already on the desk: 30252 if your product names are long or you print variants, 30336 if not. Whichever you pick, print the title, the barcode and the price, leave the SKU off unless you have a reason, and keep the barcode at the ceiling by not adding lines you do not need. The barcode type itself, EAN-13, UPC-A, EAN-8 or Code 128, is chosen from the variant's barcode field automatically, and a variant without one prints its SKU as Code 128 so a label is never blank.

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