Hello support? Any help is appreciated.
Hi @roygilsing ,
Thanks for the details.
That message comes from Deutsche Post, not from the plugin. When you finalize a Waybill, the plugin sends the list of item barcodes currently in the Waybill to Deutsche Post under your DHL account number (EKP). “Access to barcode(s) … is forbidden” means Deutsche Post does not consider one of those barcodes to belong to that account.
Two things are worth knowing, and they explain why a new label didn’t help:
- The Waybill holds items from all orders you have added to it, not just the one you are looking at. If a single barcode in that list is rejected, the whole Waybill fails to finalize — so one bad item blocks every order in it.
- Clicking Create Label again on an order that already has a label reuses the same barcode. To get a genuinely new barcode you have to click Delete Label first, then create it again.
Could you try this:
- Open the Deutsche Post Waybill box on an order and look at the item list. Remove the barcode mentioned in the error using the ✕ next to it. If you would rather start clean, use Reset — that only empties the pending list on your side, it does not cancel or delete anything at Deutsche Post.
- Add your orders back in and finalize the Waybill again.
- For the order whose barcode was rejected: click Delete Label, then Create Label again so a fresh barcode is issued, and add it to the Waybill.
If it still fails after that, it points at the account settings rather than the individual label. Please check under WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping → DHL Shipping → Deutsche Post:
- Has your DHL Account Number (EKP), API key or API secret changed recently, or did Deutsche Post send you new credentials?
- Is the sandbox / test mode setting the same as it was last week? Barcodes created in test mode cannot be finalized in live mode, and vice versa.
Any labels created under a previous account or in the other mode will keep getting rejected — those orders need their label deleted and recreated so the barcode is issued under the account you are using now.
Let me know how it goes and what those settings show, and we’ll take it from there.
Hi Saleem,
Thanks for the detailed reply. An update, plus a few things that go beyond the individual label.
What was actually happening
Your advice to delete and recreate the label was right, but the mechanism turned out to be different from what it looked like. Deutsche Post reports only one barcode per error message, so every time I recreated a label the error moved to the next barcode in the list and it looked like a new broken label each time. In reality all barcodes created on 7 August were rejected, including when a single one was the only item in the Waybill. Barcodes created today are accepted, both individually and several together in one Waybill.
DHL crossborder support has since confirmed they are migrating Global Mail data to new IT infrastructure, which is the most likely cause. Unmanifested barcodes are not invoiced.
My workaround for now is to create labels and finalize the Waybill in the same session.
A bug worth fixing
DELETE /customers/{ekp}/items/{id} returns HTTP 401 “Access to the resource is not allowed” for these orphaned items. That means Delete Label cannot complete, and the order stays stuck with a barcode that can never be manifested. It would help a lot if the plugin cleared the local barcode anyway when Deutsche Post refuses the DELETE, so the merchant can issue a fresh one. Right now the only escape is editing order meta.
eConnect migration
DHL Express sent Global Mail users a notice on 31 July. The key points:
- The current Deutsche Post International API stays available until the end of Q1 2027 and is then decommissioned, with no further extension. Migration to the new eConnect API is required.
- Changes roll out in phases from 17 August to 30 September 2026: shipping label layout changes from landscape to portrait, address lines 2 and 3 are merged and limited to 40 characters, HS codes become mandatory for all customs destinations, and the print options “Document printer (PDF)” and “Label printer (90 degree ZPL)” are dropped.
Are you already working on the eConnect migration, and is there a timeline you can share? Global Mail is roughly 95% of my shipping volume, so I need to plan around this.
Feature request: label format
In my debug log the label call goes out as GET /items/{barcode}/label with an empty params array, so I always get an A4 PDF with the label on one page and the Waybill document on another. I print on a label printer and have to crop every label by hand. The DHL Paket section of the plugin does expose a label format setting. Could the Deutsche Post section get the same, or could the format be passed on the label call? Given the layout change coming in September this may be a good moment to pick it up.
Thanks,
Roy
