Better Branding: Using the Shopify Order Printer App June 16, 2015 19:00

Your brand is one of the most important assets for your business. Making that extra effort to enhance your brand can leave a positive and memorable experience with your customers. Shopify gives you a lot of options to customize the digital presence of your brand, but your online store is not the only experience your customers are going to have with your brand.

In our post about building customer loyalty, we discussed how important the end-to-end customer journey is for a positive experience — from the second the customer lands on your online store, all the way to their experience when they receive and open your product package. In this post, we will focus on the Shopify Order Printer app and how it can help enhance the package branding, while also streamlining your backend work.

Why use the Shopify Order Printer app?

By default, Shopify only sends a very plain HTML email invoice once a customer places an order on your store. The invoice is created digitally using the standard Shopify template. Some people may like the old-fashioned paper invoice for their record-keeping, or a PDF invoice that they can easily print or forward to an accountant. An email print-out may not be the cleanest option in this case as typically a lot of metadata gets printed as well.

The Order Printer is a FREE app by Shopify that allows you to print customized invoices, receipts, labels, packing slips, and other items to enhance your brand.

The Shopify Order Printer app lets you customize and create templates for various documents. The app gives you an easy way to include a branded and customized invoice and packing slip in the package that is delivered to your customer. This gives you a lot of options for designing the last piece of branding your customers see before they use your products.

In addition, the app allows you to print documents for various orders at the same time. This can speed up the order fulfillment timeline as it streamlines printing of invoices and shipping labels.

How to use the app

Once you install the Order Printer app from the Shopify App Store, the app will show a list of your last 10 orders made at your shop to get you started. The app comes with default templates for both an invoice and a packing slip.

You can use the app to print invoices and packing slips for your orders in three simple steps (detailed in Shopify documentation):

  1. From the Orders menu, select an order and click on ‘...‘
  2. Select the printing document template (invoice, packing slip, or another)
  3. Click Print to print the document

To print a document for multiple orders, go to the Bulk actions dropdown in the Orders page and select Print with Order Printer, where you can select multiple orders for which to print the documents.

As a starting point for customization, you can play around with the HTML either through the template editor in the app, or using the HTML provided on the Shopify Order Printer documentation page.

You can also add new templates to the app by going to the Manage templates page in the app. Take a look at the Shopify documentation to learn more about how to add new templates or customize existing ones.

Add your own logo

Simply adding your logo to the documents printed through the app is a big step in branding the documents your customers receive in their package. Adding a logo can be done in few easy steps with very small change to the HTML.

  1. Upload your logo image to Files in Shopify under Settings
  2. Copy the URL of the logo image file
  3. Click on the Order Printer logo on the Apps page of your store admin
  4. Click Manage templates in the app header and select the invoice or another template
  5. Locate the line <h1>{{ shop_name }}</h1> in the template editor
  6. Replace the above line with <img src="LOGO_IMAGE_URL" alt="{{ shop_name }}" />
  7. Paste the logo image URL you had copied in place of LOGO_IMAGE_URL in the above line
  8. Click Save and you’re done!

Shopify documentation has more detailed instructions on how to add your own logo.

Product Customizer integration

If you use the Product Customizer app, to add personalization and customization options for your products, you can easily integrate the customized order fields into the Order Printer app.

Integrating can be done by editing a document template under Shopify Order Printer > Manage Templates. You can find more instructions and the code in our documentation walkthrough.

Haven’t used the Product Customizer app before? Take a look at how it works in the below video:

Takeaway

Shopify’s Order Printer app can help you go that extra step in branding documents inside your shipped packages by letting you customize invoices, receipts, packing slips and more. It can also help you be more efficient in shipping items through bulk printing of invoices and other documents for multiple orders at the same time.

The app is free and supported by Shopify. Try it out and tell us how your experience was in the comments below.

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