The rule sitting under all of it
The Domestic Mail Manual puts the purpose plainly: "The return address tells USPS where the sender of a mailpiece wants it returned if the piece cannot be delivered." Section 602.1.5.3 then requires the sender's domestic return address to appear legibly on a long list of categories, which includes Priority Mail, Priority Mail Express, USPS Ground Advantage Retail and Commercial, Package Services, Parcel Select, Registered Mail and USPS Returns service. A further clause is worth knowing for anyone tempted to borrow a foreign address: a domestic piece bearing one cannot be returned to sender and is handled as dead mail, per pe.usps.com, checked 2026-07-28.
What a reseller can legitimately do
The from address has to be real and able to receive a bounced parcel. It does not have to belong to whoever taped the box shut. Resellers routinely print their own business address, a rented mailbox or a shopfront as the sender while a supplier does the packing, and that is the ordinary shape of the arrangement. The document that actually gives the game away is usually inside the box rather than on it, so a supplier printing their own paperwork into the carton undoes the whole exercise.
An honest account of what we support
We sell single US domestic parcel labels bought as a guest. We do not run fulfillment, we do not integrate with a supplier system, and we do not sell international labels, so a full three-party arrangement with a drop shipper abroad sits outside what our checkout does. One more thing worth saying out loud: our checkout runs the sender address through carrier records before payment in the same way it runs the destination, so an invented from address fails at exactly the same gate a fake destination does.
