Colorado Web Solutions

How to Customize your Yahoo Store’s Packing Slips

Posted on July 2nd, 2010 by Matt Sampson - Colorado Web Solutions

At Colorado Web Solutions, we are asked by almost every client if there is a way to customize the packing slip that Yahoo! Store automatically generates. Some would like to add their logo to the packing slip, others want to add a coupon or return information to their packing slip. While your actual Yahoo Store can not customize the packing slip, there is a very simple way to do it. I speak from experience, when I worked for an online retail store we customized our yahoo store packing slips for years. It just requires an extra step, but one that was very worthwhile in my opinion to establish additional trust and loyalty with your customers and shoppers.

Here is how we customized our Yahoo! Store’s packing slip:

First you will need to create a template of what you want your packing slip to look like. Every Yahoo Store generates the exact same style of packing slip, so it’s safe to assume that the bottom 1/5 of your page is probably not being used when you print your packing slips. Every now and then we would get an order that would span multiple pages and those orders were a little cluttered, but they were few and far between. If you have a store that typically sells less than 6 to 8 products per order, this will work great for you. We added our Logo to the BOTTOM of the packing slip as you can see from the image to the side here. We also took it a step further and added our icon (a snow leopard) as a watermark on the page by fading the image to about 10% opacity. The result was a rather strange looking page, but when combined with the Yahoo Store packing slip, it looked great!

Once we created our packing slip template, we printed off a few hundred on our laser printer and those became the Packing Slip pages. Every order was then printed AGAIN on the same page, combining the Yahoo Store packing slip and the pre-printed template we created. It worked beautifully! Yes, it took a little extra time, but it was worth the 5 minutes to print out a ream of templates every few days to use.

Adding a Return form to your Packing Slip
We ended taking it a step further as the years went on and started pre-printing our Return Form on the back of the sheet as well. Once the Packing Slip templates were printed, we put them back in the printer flipped upside down and we printed our return form on the opposite side. The return form evolved over the years as we learned more and more about what customers wanted and were willing to do. If you deal with a lot of returns, I would highly suggest including a return form of some kind with your orders (all the big retailers do as well!) so that it’s easy for both your customer to return an item and for you as the merchant to process that return. Think about what information you want from your customers when they return something and be sure to include it. You can see our old return forms here as well. One huge advantage to adding the return form to the back of the packing slip was that we already had the customers information on the flip side so we never received anymore “unknown” returns. The options are limitless with your packing slip when you have full control. Just be sure to leave the majority of your “front page” blank to accommodate the automated Yahoo Store packing slip and the rest is up to your imagination. In the next few days I’m also going to be talking more specifically about your return forms and process as well as some creative ideas on getting quick repeat orders from your customers with the use of coupons in your shipping boxes.

For those of you that might not have the technical skills to create a packing slip template like this, we would be happy to create one for you and deliver it to you in a ready-to-print, PDF format. Depending on your needs, the prices range from around $75 to $400 ($400 being a more complex Return Form creation with lots of custom work). Click here to contact us about a custom Packing Slip for your Yahoo Store.

I hope you found this quick lesson on how to customize your Yahoo Store’s packing slip helpful! Have a great day everyone.

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