Printing Etsy shipping labels on a Mac

Most Etsy label trouble on a Mac traces back to one decision made earlier than people realise: which format you downloaded. Get that right and the printing is straightforward. Get it wrong and no print setting will rescue it.

Pick the right format at download

Etsy offers more than one label layout, and for many carriers that includes a 4x6 option intended for label printers alongside a paper-sheet version sized for A4 or Letter.

• 4x6 / label printer format — the page is already the size of your roll. Print it at 100% and you are done.
• Paper / sheet format — a full Letter or A4 page with the label occupying part of it, designed to be printed on office paper and cut with scissors.

If your labels keep coming out small in the corner of the roll, you are almost certainly downloading the second one. The printer is not shrinking the label; it is shrinking the whole page, and the label shrinks with it.

Then get the print settings right

Download the PDF rather than printing from the browser window. Browser print paths add their own margins and scaling, and some re-render the page rather than passing the PDF through, which softens barcode edges enough to matter at the scanner.

1. Open the downloaded file, then File → Print and Show Details.
2. Select your thermal printer.
3. Set Paper Size to 4 × 6 or 100 × 150 mm. If it is not offered, add it under Manage Custom Sizes with all four margins at 0.
4. Set Scale to 100% and Margins to none.

The full walkthrough, including why the margins matter more than they look, is in how to print 4x6 labels on a Mac.

When you're stuck with the sheet format

Sometimes the 4x6 option is not available for the carrier or service you picked, and you get a full page whether you want one or not. Then the label has to be cut out of the page before printing, so the printer receives a 4x6 document instead of a Letter one.

Preview does this for free: select the label with the rectangular selection tool, press Cmd+K to crop, then print at 100% on 4x6. It works, and it is completely reasonable for a few orders a day.

The catch is that it is the same six actions every time, the selection is freehand so no two labels land identically, and it does not batch. The useful observation is that the label sits in the same place on every page Etsy generates for you — so the measurement only has to happen once.

Batches

Etsy will give you several labels as one PDF with a label per page. macOS will happily print that as a single job, which is fine right up until the printer jams or runs out of stock partway through. At that point you have no idea which label failed, and reprinting means sending all of them again.

If the wrong format was already generated, our free browser tool crops the label out of the page at full size in a few seconds, entirely in your browser.