Getting Your FBA Shipment Documents Right
Amazon FBA requires a lot of PDF paperwork. Shipment creation reports, packing slips, box content sheets, carrier labels. Each shipment you send to a fulfillment center generates a handful of documents, and doing this manually by hand is slow and error-prone. Fba Pdf Quick is a lightweight automation script and template system that generates the required Amazon FBA PDFs in bulk, usually pulling data from your existing spreadsheets or CSV exports rather than forcing you to click through the Seller Central interface one shipment at a time. I use this mainly because Amazon's own report generator has gotten increasingly slow. For a shipment with 40+ boxes, the platform sometimes takes two or three minutes just to render each individual PDF, and if your internet drops mid-download, you start over from scratch. The script sidesteps that entirely by reading directly from your shipment data files and outputting clean PDFs without ever touching the Seller Central reporting page during the generation step.
What Fba Pdf Quick Actually Does
The core workflow is straightforward. You export your shipment manifest from Seller Central as a CSV, run it through the script, and it spits out the boxed_content_shipment_report PDF, the packing slip for each box, and the shipment_label PDF for any pallet shipments. It handles the FBA box content report template format that Amazon updated in 2023, which is where most free tools break. The script matches SKU-level quantity data to the correct box IDs and formats everything according to Amazon's current requirements. There is a Python dependency chain, but it is minimal. You need Python 3.9 or later, the ReportLab library for PDF generation, and openpyxl if you are pulling from Excel files. Installation takes about five minutes on a normal machine. The configuration file is just a JSON file where you store your shipment templates, default carrier settings, and the output directory. Once configured, a single command generates all the PDFs for an entire shipment. The script does not connect to Amazon's API. It reads from exported files and writes PDFs locally. That is both its main advantage and its limitation. You cannot generate reports that Amazon has not yet issued, and you need to wait for the CSV export to appear before you can use the tool. For most sellers this is not a bottleneck, since shipment reports are available within minutes of creating the shipment in Seller Central.
Setting It Up and Running a Shipment
Create a new directory on your computer for the tool. Clone or download the repository, then create a virtual environment and install the dependencies. After that, copy the sample config file and edit it with your default values. The key fields are output_dir for where PDFs should land, default_shipment_name as a label prefix, and the template_path pointing to where you keep the Amazon box content report template file. When you have a shipment ready, go into Seller Central, create the shipment, then wait for the reports to generate. Download the shipment manifest CSV. Run the command: python fba_pdf_quick.py --shipment manifest.csv --output ./shipments/shipment_2026_01. The script reads each line, maps it to the correct box, and generates the appropriate PDFs. A 50-box shipment typically processes in under 30 seconds on a standard laptop. I should mention a specific edge case that took me a while to figure out. Amazon occasionally includes a box in your shipment manifest that has zero items listed in the box_content field but still appears as a valid box ID. When the script encounters these empty-box entries, the default behavior tries to generate a packing slip with no item rows, which produces a malformed PDF that Amazon's receiving system flags as invalid. The fix is to add a filter in the config that skips boxes with zero line items, or to preprocess the CSV and remove those rows before feeding them to the script. I added a simple pandas filter that checks for total_quantity greater than zero and drops the rest.
Get the Full Details
Another thing to watch for is SKU variations that share the same base ASIN but have different FNSKU labels. The script treats each FNSKU as a distinct row, which is correct for Amazon's purposes, but if your CSV uses old-style ASIN grouping rather than FNSKU-level granularity, the output will consolidate items incorrectly. Always verify that your export includes the FNSKU column before running the generation step.
Pitfalls and Where It Falls Short
Fba Pdf Quick will not solve every document problem in an FBA shipment. It does not generate inbound shipment carrier labels for LTL freight, and it does not produce the newer box_seal_report that Amazon sometimes requests. It also cannot handle shipment adjustments after you have already sent boxes to a fulfillment center. If Amazon re-allocates your shipment and the box IDs change, you need to re-export and regenerate everything from scratch. The tool is also fragile when Amazon updates their report template format. Between January 2024 and March 2024, Amazon changed the column headers in the box_content_shipment_report by adding two new fields and renaming an existing one. The script broke for about two weeks until the maintainer updated the header mapping. If you rely on this tool, pin your version and check the repository for updates before running it on a live shipment. For sellers who run hundreds of shipments per month, you may want to look at the commercial alternatives that offer API integration and automatic schedule generation. Fba Pdf Quick is free and works well for small to medium volume operations, but it requires manual intervention on every shipment. If your throughput is high enough that 30 seconds per shipment adds up, you are probably better off using a dedicated FBA management platform that pulls and generates documents through Amazon's own API endpoints.
The main advantage remains cost and simplicity. No monthly subscription, no account linking, no data leaving your machine. If you are comfortable with a terminal window and occasional CSV cleanup, this tool handles the vast majority of FBA PDF generation needs without any recurring fees.
