How-to guide
How to print Avery 5160 barcode labels from Shopify
The exact Avery 5160 geometry — 2.625″ × 1″ labels, 30 per sheet — plus the step-by-step workflow and print settings that keep all thirty barcodes aligned.
8 min read · Published July 9, 2026 · Updated July 9, 2026
Avery 5160 is the default label sheet of the office world: thirty 2.625″ × 1″ labels on a US Letter page, sold in every office supply store, priced sensibly, and handled by any laser or inkjet printer. That makes it a natural choice for product barcode labels too — price tags for a jewelry tray, shelf labels for a stockroom, barcode stickers for the weekly restock. The hard part is not the sheet. It is getting your Shopify products onto it so that all thirty barcodes land inside their labels instead of drifting across the die-cut gaps.
If you have tried, you know the failure mode. The top row looks fine, the third row sits slightly low, and by row ten the barcode prints half on one label and half on the next. Thirty labels go in the bin — and any code that straddles a die-cut edge will not scan at the register either. This is rarely a printer defect. It is almost always one of two things: a layout that does not match the real 5160 geometry, or a print dialog quietly rescaling the page on its way to paper.
This guide fixes both. It gives you the exact 5160 dimensions, the step-by-step workflow from Shopify products to a printed sheet, and the print settings that keep the grid aligned. If you print on a thermal roll printer instead of sheets, read How to print barcode labels on a Dymo printer from Shopify. If some of your variants are missing barcode values, start with How to generate unique barcode numbers for your products — the numbers have to exist before the labels can.
What you need before you start
- A box of Avery 5160 labels, or any compatible 30-up sheet that states 2.625″ × 1″ on the packaging. The layout below applies to the geometry, not the brand name.
- A desktop laser or inkjet printer that takes US Letter paper. 5160 is a Letter format; if your printer and stationery are A4, use the A4 equivalent (Avery L7160, 21 labels per sheet) and its own template instead.
- Products in Shopify whose variants carry a value in the barcode field — not just a SKU. The barcode field is what your POS looks up when the scanner beeps.
- A way to lay out the sheet: a barcode label app inside Shopify, or a word processor template you fill in by hand.
Print Avery 5160 barcode labels, step by step
- 1
Confirm which sheet you actually have
Check the box before anything else: it should say 2.625″ × 1″ labels, 30 per sheet, on US Letter paper. Office-brand 30-up sheets copy this geometry and work identically, but a similar-looking 28-up or A4 sheet will never align with a 5160 layout no matter what you change in the print dialog.
- 2
Set up the 5160 layout
Use a template that encodes the real geometry: 3 columns and 10 rows, a 0.5″ top margin, 0.19″ side margins, and a horizontal pitch of 2.75″ so each column starts exactly where the die-cut does. In a label app, pick the Avery 5160 preset. In a word processor, enter the values from the table below by hand and double-check the page size is Letter, not A4.
- 3
Pick products and set real quantities
Print quantities per variant, not one label per product. If you received twelve of one shirt and three of another, the sheet should hold twelve labels and three labels. Count the total — every 30 labels is one sheet — and note how full the last sheet will be, so you know how many blank labels remain for the next run.
- 4
Give every variant a barcode value
A variant with an empty barcode field prints as a blank box or gets skipped, depending on the tool. Check the field on every variant in the run, and generate unique codes for the blanks before you lay out the sheet. Duplicated codes are worse than missing ones: they scan cleanly and ring up the wrong product.
- 5
Check the preview against a physical sheet
Before spending label stock, test against reality: print the layout on plain paper, lay it over a real 5160 sheet, and hold both up to a bright light. Every barcode should sit inside its label with clear space on all four sides. This test is honest work if the preview you checked is the same file you print — export the final PDF, then verify that.
- 6
Export the PDF at Letter size
The PDF page must be 8.5″ × 11″ — the sheet's size, not the label's. When the page size matches the physical sheet, the printer has no reason to scale anything and the margins carry the alignment. A PDF generated at any other page size must be resized on the way to paper, and resizing is exactly what breaks the grid.
- 7
Print at 100% scale
In the print dialog, set scaling to 100%, 'Actual size' or 'Scale: none' — the wording depends on the PDF viewer. Never use 'Fit to page', 'Shrink to fit' or 'Fit to printable area'. Feed label sheets from the standard tray, and run each sheet through the printer once: label sheets cycled repeatedly through a hot laser fuser are more likely to jam or peel.
- 8
Verify row one and row ten, then scan
Compare the top-left and bottom-left labels on the printed sheet. If row one is aligned but row ten has drifted, the page was scaled. If every row is offset by the same amount, the margins are wrong. Once the grid is right, scan two or three labels with the scanner you actually use at the counter before printing the rest of the run.
Avery 5160 dimensions and layout
These are the numbers that matter. They describe the physical geometry of the sheet: enter them into any label tool, print at 100%, and the grid matches the die-cut.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Label size | 2.625″ × 1″ (66.7 × 25.4 mm) |
| Labels per sheet | 30 — 3 columns × 10 rows |
| Page size | US Letter, 8.5″ × 11″ |
| Top and bottom margins | 0.5″ |
| Left and right margins | 0.19″ |
| Horizontal pitch | 2.75″ (0.125″ gap between columns) |
| Vertical pitch | 1″ (rows touch — no gap) |
Two of these values cause most hand-built template mistakes. The vertical pitch is exactly 1″ with no gap between rows, so any extra row spacing — even a millimetre added by a word processor's default paragraph spacing — accumulates down the page and pushes row ten off its label. And the horizontal pitch is 2.75″, not 2.625″: the 0.125″ gutter between columns is part of the geometry, and dropping it shoves the second and third columns onto the gaps.
If the sheet still does not line up
Rows drift progressively down the page
Progressive drift is scaling, full stop. Check the print dialog for a scale option hidden behind 'More settings' or 'Advanced' — browser print dialogs in particular re-enable fit-to-page silently. Printing from a dedicated PDF viewer instead of a browser tab gives you an explicit 'Actual size' switch, which is worth the extra step whenever label stock is in the tray.
The whole grid is offset by a constant amount
A constant offset means the margins are wrong or the printer feeds the sheet slightly off-center. Re-check the template against the table above first. If the template is correct, print a plain-paper test, measure the offset with a ruler, and compensate by nudging the page margins by that measured amount — most printers feed with a small but consistent bias you can correct once and keep.
The layout is right but the codes will not scan
Alignment and scannability are different problems. If the labels sit perfectly in the grid but the register refuses to read them, work through Barcode labels won't scan: 6 fixes. At this label size the usual suspects are quiet zones eaten by long product titles, and print density — both are covered there, in order of likelihood.
Doing this with Solvi Barcode Labels
Solvi Barcode Labels is our Shopify app for exactly this workflow, and Avery 5160 is one of its built-in presets. The geometry in the table above is encoded in the template, so there is nothing to measure or type: pick the preset and the preview immediately shows a Letter sheet at the true 5160 dimensions, with the measurements displayed next to it — 2.625″ × 1″, 30 per sheet.
Quantities start at zero and can be applied in bulk, so a restock of mixed quantities takes one pass down the list. Variants missing a barcode are flagged in a single banner, and generated codes are unique Code 128 values — checked against your whole catalog and saved to your variants in Shopify before anything prints. The preview is the exact PDF you download, rendered by the same engine at the same coordinates, and a live counter tells you how many 5160 sheets the run needs. A start-at-label offset lets you begin printing at label #7, so the partial sheet left over from last week's run is not wasted.
The free plan covers 30 labels a month — one full 5160 sheet — which is deliberately enough to verify alignment and scanning on your own printer before you pay anything.
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Do this in minutes with Solvi Barcode Labels
Print barcode labels right the first time: unique codes, true-size sheets, ready in minutes.