Answers,
printed in full.

A place to buy shipping labels one at a time — for less than the Post Office counter charges on almost every package — with nothing else attached. The exact accounting, including the handful of packages where the counter still wins, is in the next answer.

You tell us the package — weight, where it is going, which service. We show you the price. You pay for that label and print it on whatever printer you own: a thermal label printer, or a sheet of paper and a roll of tape. Then you drop the box off or schedule a pickup like you always have.

That's the entire product. There's no subscription to cancel, no monthly minimum to hit, no seat to buy for the person who packs boxes on Saturdays. Print one label in March and none in April, and you paid for one label.

Shipify is built for people who ship their own orders — resellers, one-person shops, anybody printing labels at a kitchen table. Not a warehouse system. Not a storefront. Labels.

Because there's no trick: there are two published prices, and you have only ever been shown one of them.

The Post Office prints two price lists for the same box travelling the same distance. Walk up to the counter and you pay the retail price. Print the label electronically, through the carrier's commercial channel, and you pay the commercial price. Both lists are public. Both are the carrier's own numbers. The commercial one is simply written for shippers who print in volume, and a person mailing nine packages a week does not clear that bar alone.

Everyone printing through Shipify clears it together. We buy at the commercial price, and we hand you that exact price plus one flat markup per label. Not a percentage — a fixed amount, identical on the cheapest label in the table and the most expensive one.

The exact markup is printed on every quote and published in full on the rates page.

One package, both prices

Where it does not work

Our price is not lower in every single square of the rate table. Every quote on this site prints the retail number next to ours, so you can see which is smaller before you spend anything.

We haven't set a public date, and we're not going to invent one so this page looks busy. The day we can sell you a label, this page says so first.

What is true today:

• The rates are real. Every figure on this site is read from the carrier's published rate table, not from a mock-up.
• The buying flow is built and switched off. You can walk the whole thing — package, comparison, checkout, label — on the demo. Every label it prints is stamped as sample data, and the pay button is disabled on purpose.
• Nothing is charged. There is no card field on this site, because there is nothing to buy yet.

Early access means one thing: you leave an email address, and on the day the pay button turns on, you get one message about it. It is not a newsletter and we have nothing to sell you in the meantime.

Get early access Walk the demo first

Two very different things get called a refund, so here is the split.

A label you printed and never shipped

The order cancelled, the buyer changed the address, you mistyped the weight. The label was never scanned into the carrier's network, so nobody moved a box and the postage is still sitting there. At launch you ask for it back, the carrier confirms the label went unused, and you get the postage and the markup, credited to your Shipify balance.

Both halves, on purpose. We're not keeping our cut on a label that never moved a box. That's the rule we open with, it's written the same way on the rates page, and it's section 08 of the terms in full — including the list of requests that get refused.

The carrier sets the window you have to ask inside, and the wait before they confirm. We will publish those exact numbers before we start selling rather than guess at them in writing now. The next answer walks the whole timeline and says where the money lands.

A label the carrier already scanned

Once a package enters the network, the service was delivered and the postage is spent. Nobody can refund that — not us, not the carrier, not a support agent with a good attitude. If a scanned package is lost or damaged, that is a claim rather than a refund, and it is handled by the carrier under the terms of the service you bought.

If we charged you wrong

If a bug on our side prices a label incorrectly, that is ours to fix and we refund the difference. Email us with the label and we will go look.

Two separate answers, and the second one is the one people are actually asking.

Where it lands

A refund is credited to your Shipify balance. It buys your next label. It does not return to your card, because that is not the path the money took: we had already paid the carrier for that postage, and the carrier returns it to us as credit on the account we buy postage through. Sending it onward to a card would be us covering a carrier's debt out of a different pocket, and a company our size should not be doing that quietly.

So the balance is a closed loop. It buys labels and covers carrier adjustments. There is no withdrawal button, no transfer to another Shipify account, no sending it to a friend. Close your account with money still on it and you email us — a person reverses the payments that put it there, back to where they came from. That is the only way money leaves.

How long

Three steps, and only the middle one is slow:

• You ask. One button on the label. Instant.
• The carrier confirms the label was never used. This is the wait. Carriers hold an unused label for a set period before they will confirm it, because they are checking that the parcel does not turn up in the network after you asked.
• We credit your balance. The moment their confirmation reaches us — postage and our markup together, as one line in your transactions.

We are not printing the carrier's waiting period on this page yet, and we are not going to estimate it. A pre-launch company inventing a refund window is writing a number it has never had to meet. The exact figures go here, and on the label itself when you request the refund, before we sell anything.

What we will commit to now is the shape: nothing is credited before the carrier settles, nothing is quietly held back after they do, and if a request is refused you get the carrier's reason rather than a shrug. The refusal list is written out in section 08 of the terms.

Today: you don't. There is no card field anywhere on this site, because there is nothing to buy yet.

Here is the plan for launch day, so nothing about it is a surprise.

Your first label needs no balance

You should not have to hand a new company money before you know its printer works. So the first label you ever buy is paid for on its own — you see the total, you pay that total, you print it. No deposit, no top-up, no minimum to clear before anything happens.

After that, a balance

Once you are shipping regularly, you add money to a Shipify balance and each label draws down from it. That is one payment instead of forty, and it is what makes buying a whole batch in one pass possible.

There is a minimum top-up. It will be printed above the button that takes the money, not below it, not in a tooltip, and never after you have committed to anything. Same rule as everywhere else on this site: the total sits above the button that charges it.

What we will never charge

• No subscription. Print nothing in March and March costs nothing.
• No monthly minimum, and no fee for failing to hit one.
• No per-seat pricing. Whoever packs boxes on Saturday is not a licence.
• No auto-reload you did not switch on yourself.

The markup on the label is the entire business. It is the number on the rates page, and it is on every quote before you spend anything.

It means the screen you are looking at is wired to a stand-in instead of the real thing, and we would rather stamp that across the top of the page than let you find out afterwards.

What is switched off behind the banner

• No money moves. No card is charged, no balance is really spent, no payment processor is contacted.
• No carrier is contacted. Nothing is bought from USPS. No tracking number you see is a real tracking number.
• Labels are not postage. They print, they look right, and they are stamped so nobody can mistake one for something you could tape to a box. Tape one to a box and it goes precisely nowhere.

Everything else is real: the same rate table, the same forms, the same validation, the same arithmetic on the total. That is the point of a test mode — you are walking the actual flow, with the two dangerous ends unplugged.

Why the banner stays after launch

Even when we are open, the banner is wired to the rails rather than to a date. If we ever take a payment rail or a carrier connection offline — an outage, a migration, a bug we are chasing — the banner comes back on every screen, automatically, for as long as that rail is down.

So the rule is simple, and it is worth remembering: banner up, nothing you do is being charged or shipped. The day you see it on a real account, that is us telling you something is off before you find out from a customer.

Right now the banner is on everywhere, because every rail is a stand-in. The whole product is in test mode until we open.

No. Plenty of people ship for years on a printer they already own and a roll of packing tape, and a label from us prints on one exactly as well.

At launch every label comes in three shapes, and you pick the one that matches whatever is on your desk:

• 4×6 PDF — the thermal size. If you own a 4×6 label printer, this is the one; it lands at the right size with no scaling to fight.
• Letter sheet — the same label centred on US Letter, so you print it on paper, cut it out, and tape it down. Costs a sheet and thirty seconds.
• ZPL — raw printer language, for the Zebra-type printers that would rather be sent instructions than a picture.

The app remembers which one you picked, so you set it once. On a phone the label goes straight into the share sheet — AirDrop it to the machine that has the printer, or mail it to yourself, whatever your setup is.

Reprinting a label you already bought is free and always will be. Losing a PDF is not a billable event.

That is the whole reason this exists. Selling forty things on a Sunday night should not mean forty trips through the same form.

At launch you export the orders from wherever you sold them, drop the file in, and we read it:

• We guess the columns. Marketplace exports all name things differently — one calls it Ship To Zip, the next calls it Buyer postcode. We match what we can and show you the mapping to correct, rather than silently guessing wrong.
• Every row is checked before anything is bought. Missing weight, a zip that is not a zip, an address the carrier will not take — those get flagged as rows, with the field named, while you can still fix them.
• Each row is bought on its own. Row 12 failing does not take rows 1 through 11 down with it. You get a result per row: bought, or not bought and why.
• Each row is charged on its own too. No lump sum taken up front against work that has not happened.

There is a cap on how many rows go in one file — the app tells you the number when you drop the file in, and splitting a bigger export across two runs is fine.

Then every label in the batch comes back as one file to send at the printer, and you spend the evening taping instead of typing.

Printing a label requires a specific, small list of facts, and we would rather show you the list than describe it.

What a label needs

• Where the package is going, and who it is going to.
• Where it is coming from — your return address.
• What the box is: weight, size, and the service you picked.
• An email address, so we can send you the label and the receipt.

The delivery address has to reach the carrier, because the carrier is the one driving it there. That is the only place it goes.

What we will not do with it

We don't sell address books. We don't rent them, hand them to advertisers, or use the fact that you shipped forty sneakers last month to sell you anything. There's no version of Shipify where your buyer list is the product — the markup on the label is the product, which is exactly why we can say this plainly.

This site, right now

These pages are static files. No analytics, no advertising pixels, no session recording, no third-party chat widget watching you read. The only request your browser makes to anyone but us is to Google Fonts, which serves the three typefaces you are reading. If that ever changes, it will be in the privacy policy before it is in the code.

The full policy lives at Privacy. It is posted as a draft while we are pre-launch, which means it is there to be read and argued with before anyone has data on the line.