How can I remove customer's phone number for the label

[Ramos21]

Hello All, 

I googled and tried everything to remove the customer's phone number from the 4x6 label and I can't automatically make that happen. I tried AfterShip, ShippingEasy, and EasyShipping, and for the past month, I've been using ShipStation. Everything is working properly except the customer's phone number on the label. I reached out to ShipStation support and they said it's a required field and UPS asks for that, but I disagree because I am able to manually edit customer information > remove the customer's phone number > then create/buy the label just fine.

Please this is driving me nuts and I can't manually remove from hundreds of orders. Thank you

[jeremiah_lchh]

Why are you trying to remove the phone number? Carriers want it on there in case they need to contact the customer when they are delivering it.

[Ramos21]

Have you ever received a phone number from any couriers asking for directions of your house. They don't have time for this 

[roci13]

May have been the case 15 years ago but never, ever has a carrier called me or my company to get directions. They're not interested in 100% deliverability they are interested in the end of their shift. Printing a phone number on a shipping label serves zero purpose other than give the porch pirate yet another piece of your personal information.

[Ramos21]

Exactly, I don't know what to do to get this point to the ShipStation Team. When you contact them, their answer is that "UPS requires a phone number on the label". No, they don't because I remove the phone numbers manually, and I am able to buy and print the label. It's insane,

All they need to do is to give us the ability for us in the Automation Process to remove the phone number from the Destination (if any). 
Funny thing is that I have multiple platforms synced in my account (Amazon, ETSY, Website), and orders from ETSY do not import the phone.

[roci13]

ETSY devs are smart. They probably already determined that this info does not need to be given to ShipStation.  I have a custom ecommerce site so I had to write my own connection to ShipStation, but the benefit was that I was able to leave the phone number out as well.

[Moderator-Davis]

Hey there @Ramos21, 

There is not an automated way to remove those phone numbers, as the carrier's do prefer, if not request, to have that contact info available. 

The only idea that comes to mind would be to potentially check where the orders are importing from to see if that info can be removed prior to import into ShipStation. 

Although, to reiterate what @jeremiah_lchh mentioned, I may not recommend that adjustment.

[Ramos21]

How do we raise this issue to Ship station? It should be optional. Would you be comfortable have your phone number in the label? What if someone steals your package now they have your phone number too

[Ramos21]

Can you please see this thread and the conversation and bring up to the ShipStation Team

[Moderator-Davis]

Howdy yall! 

Thank you for this feedback concerning phone numbers on labels. 

If I hear of any updates in this regard, I will surely return to this post to keep us all on the same page 🙂 

[Ramos21]

I don't think anyone would like their personal phone number on the label. Order from Amazon does not have phone numbers on the label. 
I can't delete it from the E-COMMERCE since I use multiples platforms and I have no control

[rocinante]

I 100% agree with this. With the rampant number of porch pirate thefts who would be comfortable knowing their phone number was printed on the shipping label!

While UPS or FedEx might encourage this (or maybe they used to), to me this seems like a huge security risk. Someone steals your package and now they also have your phone number. I have NEVER received an amazon package that had my phone number printed on the label, I'm sure for this exact reason. 

We can't always control how the data is sent over from our ecommerce platform, so I think ShipStation should add an option that allows us to toggle whether or not we want the phone number to print on the label. (And I think it should be OFF by default).

Besides - Raise your hand if anyone here has *EVER* received a friendly courtesy call from their neighborhood FedEx or UPS driver to say "hey mr. smith for some reason we can't find your address, would you mind giving us directions"? The answer is NO. The drivers don't have time to do this. 

[Ramos21]

How do we raise this issue to Ship station? Holidays are coming and right now I need to go to every single order and delete the phone numbers. Sometimes I forget to do before buy the label then I have to use a PDF editor and erase the phone number. It's painful 

[rocinante]

On this site (https://community.shipstation.com/) there is an "ideas" link in the navigation bar. I just added this as an idea. Maybe you can upvote that one and I would assume the dev team takes all of the submitted ideas, sorts by upvotes and then considers implementing the x most common requests.

[Ramos21]

I am thrilled that with the holidays, we have a lot of orders, but it's a NIGHTMARE going to every single order and deleting the phone number, so it doesn't get printed on the label. Why it's so hard for shipstation to create built-in removal phone number in the Automation Process? That way allows us to get the choice 

[JakeM]

This is a limited, imperfect solution, and would only work for a single carrier at a time, if the phone number is in a consistent location, and only if you print all your order labels at once:

You could print your labels, reload the printed labels into the paper supply, then create a pdf the same size as the label, with a black box where the phone number would show up, and print as many copies as you need for the already printed labels. The black box would print over the phone number and if it's a thermal printer, the number should not be readable. 

This is, of course, somewhat cumbersome, but I can't think of a quicker way to do this for 100+ labels until shipstation allows this as an option in some capacity.