Filling in a packing slip by hand for five orders a day is a minor task. Doing the same for two hundred orders a day is a genuinely different problem, and the right answer changes with volume.
Low volume: manual generation is genuinely fine
If you're shipping a handful of orders daily, a free tool where you type in details each time costs a few minutes total and doesn't justify any added complexity or cost.
Growing volume: templates and copy-paste habits help
Once you're shipping dozens of orders, keeping a consistent template and having customer/order details ready to paste in quickly (from your order system) speeds things up without needing full automation yet.
High volume: automation earns its cost
At real e-commerce scale, connecting your order system directly to automatic slip generation removes manual entry (and manual entry errors) entirely — this is usually where a paid, integrated solution starts making clear financial sense over manual work.
What to look for if you do automate
Integration with your actual sales channel (marketplace, storefront platform), batch printing support, and the ability to customize the template to match your brand are the practical things worth checking before committing to a tool.
Don't automate before you actually need to
Setting up automation prematurely, before order volume justifies it, adds complexity and cost for a problem you don't have yet. Move to automation when manual work is genuinely eating meaningful time, not before.