Printing packing slips without logging in

Most webshop owners start the day the same way. Laptop open, back office up, work through the night's orders, tick them off, print. With five orders that costs a few minutes. With fifty it is a morning's work, and it is work nobody is better off for.

Where the time actually goes

The printing itself takes seconds. What costs time is everything around it: logging in, finding the right screen, selecting the orders that aren't done yet, checking you haven't done one twice, and remembering where you were when the phone rang.

That last one is the expensive part. A manual step that gets interrupted has to be started again — and sooner or later an order slips through. Not because anyone is careless, but because "where was I" is not reliable bookkeeping.

What changes

Autoprint watches on your behalf. The program runs on your own Windows computer and asks your webshop every thirty seconds whether there are new orders. If there is one, the packing slip is composed and sent to your printer. You don't have to be there.

What you are left with is a stack of packing slips in the tray, in the order the sales came in. No screen, no selection, no chance of skipping one.

Two things that end up on paper

Every packing slip carries two markings that show you straight away what needs to happen. PICKUP appears when the buyer is collecting the parcel themselves, so no box goes out to an address nobody is expecting. And UNPAID stays on it as long as no payment has come in.

Those two are there because they prevent a mistake you only discover when the buyer calls.

And when an order changes

It happens: an item added, a different delivery address, a payment that comes in after all. Autoprint notices the order has changed and offers it again, so you have the current packing slip instead of the outdated one.

To do that it compares what would end up on paper, not what the webshop system touched internally. An internal note that doesn't appear on the packing slip therefore doesn't produce a second sheet.

What you need

A Windows computer that is switched on at the times you want to print, and a printer connected to it. Nothing else. The program keeps itself up to date: it installs its own updates and restarts if something gets stuck.

Want to know how setting it up goes? The manual walks through it in getting started, and there is a chapter on connecting your webshop with exactly which key to fetch from where.