Charged for Labels You Never Shipped: Void Windows by Carrier

You print a label. Then the customer cancels. Or they email a corrected address twenty minutes later. Or the item does not fit the box you sized it for and you start over with a bigger one. The original label sits in your printer tray and never touches a truck.

Whether that costs you anything depends entirely on which carrier's logo is on it. It is a quiet leak, because it does not look like an error on your invoice. It looks like a shipment. There is a tracking number, a service level, a price. The only thing missing is the parcel.

Two billing models, and only one of them is safe

Every carrier sits in one of two camps.

Bill on scan means the carrier only invoices you once the parcel is physically scanned into their network. No scan, no charge. Canada Post and FedEx both work this way.

Bill on creation means the label itself is the billing event. UPS charges for each shipping label generated on your account, whether or not anything ever ships under it. Purolator sits nearby: you can stop a label before end of day, but once it has been manifested, undoing it becomes an invoice dispute rather than a click.

If most of your volume runs through a bill-on-scan carrier, this problem is largely handled for you. If it runs through UPS, it is not.

Canada Post: mostly solved as of July 2025

Canada Post moved to event based billing on 2 July 2025. Payment is now processed only once the item receives a physical scan in the Canada Post network, and if no scan is recorded, no invoice is generated. Sellers are no longer required to submit label cancellation requests for items that never shipped.

That removed a whole category of busywork. Two things still deserve attention. Canada Post pre-authorizes your credit card at order creation even though it only takes payment on scan, so a burst of cancelled orders can tie up room on your card without ever becoming a charge. And if you are unwinding an older paid shipment, the refund request path still exists: unused and unscanned labels within 15 days of purchase, and 90 days for untracked products like Small Packet.

UPS: this is where the money actually leaks

UPS charges for each label generated on your account. That is the important sentence in this article.

The recovery path is a void, and it is time boxed:

Within 90 days, you can void a shipment yourself through the self service tools on ups.com. Past 90 days, you have to go through UPS billing services or dispute the charge directly on the invoice it appears on. Past 180 days, a void is no longer possible at all and the charge is simply yours.

There is a second trap here that catches sellers using fulfilment partners. Only the shipper who created the label can void it. If a 3PL, a dropship supplier, or a returns processor is generating labels billed to your UPS account number, the charge is yours but the void button is theirs. You have to ask them, and they have no financial reason to hurry.

FedEx: forgiving on billing, unforgiving on the clock

FedEx bills on scan, so a label that genuinely never enters the network generally does not produce a charge. The tight part is the cancellation window. A FedEx shipment can normally only be cancelled before midnight central time on the day it was created, or on the date printed on the label for future dated shipments.

The failure mode with FedEx is not the forgotten label. It is the label that gets voided in your system and then used anyway, by a warehouse worker grabbing the wrong printout. Once it is scanned, you are billed for it regardless of what your software says.

Purolator: same day, or a 15 day invoice clock

Purolator labels can be voided the same day they are created. Labels dated in the past cannot be voided, and a label cannot be voided once it has been manifested.

After that, it becomes a billing conversation. Under Purolator's Terms and Conditions of Service, account customers must submit a request for refund or credit within 15 calendar days from the original date of the invoice. Fifteen days is not long if nobody at your company opens the invoice until month end.

What this is worth in dollars

Run your own numbers rather than trusting anyone's headline percentage.

Say you create 400 labels a month and 2 percent of them never ship, which is an ordinary rate for a store with cancellations, address corrections and repacks. That is 8 dead labels a month. At an average domestic label cost of, say, $18, you are looking at roughly $144 a month, or about $1,700 a year, sitting in labels that moved nothing.

On Canada Post and FedEx, most of that never becomes a charge. On UPS, all of it does unless somebody voids it. That gap is the whole reason to check.

The habit that closes it

Once a week, compare labels created against labels that received a first carrier scan. Anything in the first list and not the second is either a shipment you have lost track of or a charge to void. Do it weekly rather than monthly, because the windows that matter are same day for Purolator, midnight for FedEx, and 90 days for a self service UPS void.

If you use fulfilment partners who create labels on your account, add one line to that check: which of these dead labels were not created by us. Those are the ones you have to chase somebody else to fix, so they need the most lead time.

ShipSherlock reads your carrier invoices and flags charges that do not match a delivered parcel, including labels that were billed without ever moving.

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