Automatic Printing
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Automatic Printing runs your Print Chain when a Shopify order event happens, without opening the order or clicking Print. It prints order documents through your Print Stations and Desktop Utility.
It does not purchase shipping labels. Label capture is a separate workflow that starts when you print a purchased label in Shopify.
Before you turn it on#
- Enable or create the templates you want to use.
- Configure and save your Print Chain.
- Pair a Print Station, select its printers in the Desktop Utility, and keep that computer awake with the utility running.
- Check your Print Rules, if you use them.
Settings checks for a saved chain, usable templates, and a paired Print Station, and warns when some items need attention. These setup checks do not guarantee an order matches a conditional rule. Review those conditions too.
Choose when to print#
Open Settings → Automatic printing and select one trigger:
| Trigger | Best used when… |
|---|---|
| When the order is paid | You want documents after payment. Orders imported already paid, such as marketplace orders, are also eligible when they arrive. |
| When the order is fulfilled (prints per shipment) | You want documents as shipments are fulfilled. An order can produce documents for more than one shipment. |
| When the order is placed (before payment) | You need paperwork immediately, including for unpaid orders. |
Turn on Automatic printing. These controls save automatically. The feature starts off on new installs.
Enable Skip POS orders if your in-store orders do not need automatic paperwork. This only affects Automatic Printing; you can still print those orders manually. Skipped POS orders do not use the automatic-printing order allowance.
Which orders are eligible?#
Turning it on does not backfill existing orders or past shipments. With the placed/paid triggers, orders created before activation are skipped, even if paid later. With the fulfillment trigger, a new shipment created after activation can print for an older order. Use More actions → Auto Print Chain when you want to print an existing order yourself.
Test orders are skipped. Repeated delivery of the same event is guarded against duplicate printing. For placed/paid triggers, an order already processed by Autoprinter can be skipped to prevent another print. The fulfillment trigger intentionally allows documents for later shipments.
For split orders with multiple known locations, package documents can print for the fulfilled location, while whole-order invoices are not repeated for each location's shipment. See Multi-Location Printing for details and fallback behavior when location data is unavailable.
If the computer is asleep#
Jobs that were successfully queued wait for the Print Station's utility to reconnect. Keep the computer awake during packing hours and check Print History for pending jobs. After a long outage, a temporary document or label link may expire; see Printer Troubleshooting if a waiting job then fails.
This is different from an order blocked by your monthly allowance: an over-limit new order is not queued for later. After upgrading or the allowance resetting, print missed orders manually. See the Billing FAQ.
Stop or repeat a print#
Turn Automatic Printing off in Settings to stop future automatic runs. This does not cancel jobs already queued.
To print an order again with its current data and templates, use More actions → Auto Print Chain. For an existing failed job, Retry in Print History requeues that job's existing document; it does not rebuild it. See Print History.
If nothing appears#
Check the trigger, the order's creation time, test/POS status, your chain's conditions and templates, monthly allowance, and Print Station connection. An order intentionally skipped before queueing will not have a Print History row.
Use Need help? inside the app for support. If a job exists, open its details in Print History and use Report a problem to include that job's context.