You cannot print labels for the stock you just received

The pallet is open and the boxes are on the bench. You receive the delivery in Shopify, the quantities go up, and then you need a label for each item that arrived without a readable barcode. There is no button for that, and Shopify says so in one sentence:

You can't print barcode labels when you receive incoming inventory.

That is the whole problem, and it is worth separating from two neighbouring things that are not problems any more.

Scanning is solved, and it is free

If what you want is to scan a delivery in rather than type it, that exists and costs nothing. Shopify documents receiving with a scanner "in your Shopify admin with an external barcode scanner or your device's camera scanner", and that help page states no plan requirement at all.

Since 1 September 2026 it got better, because a variant stopped needing one canonical code: Shopify POS can now identify a variant by any barcode attached to it, GTIN or EAN or your own, and in Shopify's own words that is "helping staff find the right item faster during checkout, receiving, and inventory tasks" (POS v11.14). The way that change affects which code you keep where is covered on supplier SKUs on Shopify purchase orders.

One plan detail worth getting right, because the broad version of it is wrong: receiving inside Shopify POS does need POS Pro — "Your Shopify POS location must be on the Shopify POS Pro subscription for your staff to fulfill and receive transfers" — while scanning to receive in the admin does not.

The label is the part nobody has built

So you can scan the delivery in. What you cannot do is turn around and print labels for it. Shopify's own free label app is Retail Barcode Labels, and the state of it is part of the honest answer: it sits at 2.3 stars from 476 reviews, 44 per cent of them one star, with recent reviews complaining about font changes and less control over label layouts. More to the point, its listing names no purchase order, transfer or delivery as something it can print from. It prints labels for products you pick, in bulk if you like — and after a delivery, the merchants in these threads describe finding the items again themselves, product by product.

A merchant did the arithmetic on that in 2023:

after I receive the items, I then have to go in and search for each item (hundreds of items)

— DDREAM, 21 July 2023

They had come from another till system — "With Intuit POS, this took minutes. It now takes me hours." — and put the cost at "it has consumed 15+ more hours each week just for this task". Shopify's community manager replied on 15 August 2023: "At this time, I don't have any further update as to if/when this feature will be made available. All your feedback provided here has been shared, and will continue to be shared, with our developers for further consideration."

The requests have kept coming — five separate threads between January 2023 and August 2026, two of them with no staff reply at all. The recent ones are sharper because they are not asking for a feature, they are asking for one back: Stocky could export a purchase order straight to a label printer, and Stocky stopped working at the end of August 2026.

Printing labels for a delivery one product at a time? Describe how your deliveries arrive and what you need printed →

And the quantity on the label is its own question

This is the detail that separates a merchant who has thought about it from a vendor who has not. In the August 2026 thread a merchant spelled out the requirement exactly: a purchase order for fifty that arrives as thirty should print thirty labels, not fifty. Another added the case before that one — stock often turns up with no barcode at all, and the system should say which codes are missing or duplicated before anything prints.

Which means the label job needs to know what actually arrived, not what was ordered. And that is where something changed in 2026 that nobody has written about yet.

Ordered versus received became computable, in one direction only

Until this year the community's answer was that nobody could read your purchase orders at all — one merchant said exactly that in September 2026. That stopped being true a month later.

In the current Admin API there is a purchase order to read, behind two conditions rather than one: a permission the app asks you for, and — in Shopify's own words — "The user must have permission to view purchase orders." That second one is about your own staff account, so granting the app its permission is not on its own the whole answer. Its lines carry what you ordered. Its transfers field is, in Shopify's own description, "The inventory transfers linked to this purchase order." And the shipment lines underneath carry an accepted quantity and a rejected quantity. So ordered-versus-received is assemblable: order → transfers → shipments → lines.

Now the part that explains every app on the App Store. The transfer object has nineteen fields and not one of them points back at a purchase order. The nearest thing is a free-text reference name that nothing guarantees anybody filled in. So the comparison only walks from the order outwards — and a transfer sitting in front of you at the receiving bench cannot tell you which order it came from.

That is why the apps are shaped the way they are. Of fourteen listings read one at a time, nine run their own purchase-order system rather than using Shopify's, one reads the native transfer read-only, and one says outright that it "keeps its own POs and does not import native Shopify POs or Transfers." Starting at the dock, Shopify's own order is not reachable.

What the fourteen listings do and do not claim

Of the fourteen, not one joins scanning against a native transfer, flagging a mismatch and printing labels — not at any price and not on any tier. And not one of the fourteen contains language about flagging a difference between what was ordered and what arrived, which is the thing the merchants in those threads keep describing. Five of the fourteen launched between April and July 2026, so the space is being entered right now.

Where a short or damaged delivery leaves no record at all — a different and larger problem — that is why a short or damaged delivery leaves no record in Shopify.

Ordered 50 and 30 arrived? Describe what should happen when the count does not match →

A caution worth one test

A merchant reported in October 2026 that writing a variant's barcodes can replace the whole set rather than adding to it. Shopify does not document that either way, so if you or an app are about to write barcodes in bulk, try it on one variant first and look at what is left.

What Shopivibe does

You describe what happens when a delivery lands, and it works end to end. "When I receive a transfer, print one label for every item actually accepted, with our own price on it, and tell me which lines came in short against what we ordered."

The part worth paying for is the join: your order and what arrived, compared the only way the platform allows and then held as your own record, so the label count is the real count and the short line is on a list rather than in somebody's memory. Lot and batch work on the same rule, and so does the item that turned up with no code on it at all.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. If the app cannot complete your request on the spot, somebody at Shopivibe takes it on straight away and has it working in your store within 24 hours, included in the plan at no extra charge. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Ready to print the labels from the delivery itself? Describe your receiving bench in your own words →