Wunder Delivery guide
How to print Shopify orders automatically
On a normal day, printing three documents per order is tedious. On the day before Mother’s Day it is impossible. Here is how automatic printing actually works, and the order to approach it in.
First: why every printing app shows you a dialog
This is the thing worth understanding before you evaluate anything.
Browsers do not let a web page send a job straight to a printer. If they did, any website you visited could print whatever it liked. So every printing app that runs in a browser — including Shopify’s own — has to open the print dialog and wait for you.
That is not a limitation any app can code around. It is why PrintNode and QZ Tray exist: both work by running a small program on your computer that the browser is allowed to talk to directly. When somebody tells you their app prints silently, one of those two things, or something very like it, is what they mean.
Work out which documents you need
Before any of the technology, list what actually has to come out of the printer, and for whom:
- the dispatch sheet the packing bench works from
- the envelope
- the gift card
- the invoice, if a customer asks for one
They go to different people, on different paper, and often on different printers. Write down which fields each one needs before you build a template — it is much cheaper than discovering the recipient’s phone number is missing after a hundred cards.
Then choose how you print
Browser printing is fine for one printer and a modest number of orders. It is included everywhere and needs nothing installed. The cost is a dialog per document.
PrintNode is a cloud service. Install its client on one computer, and your printers become reachable — including from a server. It removes the dialog and lets each document go to its own printer. It bills separately from whatever app you are using it with.
QZ Tray is a free program that lets the browser print directly to that same computer’s printers, with no cloud hop. It is the option that gets you genuinely silent printing without a second subscription, and it usually needs a certificate set up before it stops asking permission for each job.
The right answer depends on how many printers you have, how many machines print, and whether you mind installing something.
Build templates that survive real orders
A template that looks right with a short name and a two-line message will fail on a long one. Test with the awkward cases before you turn off the dialog, because after that nobody is watching.
Two things worth knowing:
- A printed sheet is not a browser window. Styling that only applies below a certain screen width will look correct on your laptop and print wrong. This is the most common cause of “it looks fine until I print it”.
- Decide what a long message should do. Cut off at one sheet, or continue onto another. Both are reasonable; silently losing the second half of a message is not.
Add the safeguards before you remove the clicks
Automatic printing fails differently from manual printing, because nobody is standing there. Before you switch it on, make sure you can answer:
- What stops an order printing twice? A reprint costs paper. A duplicate card in the wrong box costs a customer.
- What happens to a job that fails? It needs to be visible and retryable, not silently dropped.
- How far back does it catch up? If the print computer has been off overnight, you need a limit on how much prints the moment it comes back — otherwise you arrive to yesterday’s orders on the floor.
- What happens when the internet drops? Most setups queue and catch up. Know which yours does.
Do it in this order
Start with bulk printing, under supervision, from one screen. Get the templates right. Then add multiple printers. Only once that has been boring for a fortnight should you turn on automatic printing.
If you want the specific version rather than the general one, choosing how you print compares the three setups, and Auto Print covers the unattended one — including the handful of behaviours that surprise people.