Several webshops, and still knowing where it comes out

If you have one webshop, one printer is enough. As soon as a second shop appears — another brand, another audience, or simply a second platform — the question suddenly becomes: where does this come out?

The trouble with one big stack

Two webshops on the same printer produce a single stack of packing slips in which you have to work out yourself what belongs to which shop. That works, until it doesn't: a packing slip from one shop in a box from the other, and a buyer receiving something with the wrong name on it.

Print rules

In Autoprint you set up rules. Each rule says three things: which webshop the order comes from, which printer it should go to, and under what condition the rule applies. An order runs top to bottom past those rules, and the first rule that matches wins — after that, no further looking.

That makes the order of the rules important, and it also makes it predictable. You read what happens from top to bottom, the way you read a list.

The safety net

At the bottom sits a rule you cannot delete: the safety net. Anything not picked up by a rule above it goes there.

That rule exists to prevent a silent failure. Without a safety net, an order falling just outside all your conditions would come out nowhere — no error, no paper, and you only notice when somebody asks where their parcel is. You may switch the safety net off, and then that is a choice you made rather than something that happened to you.

What a rule can weigh

The condition can look at what the order itself carries: has it been paid, is the buyer collecting it, which country the delivery address is in, how much it weighs. You combine several with "and" or "or".

What a rule cannot do is invent a field the webshop doesn't supply. That is deliberate: a rule that looks right and never fires is worse than no rule — you switch it on, nothing happens, and there is nothing to repair.

What it costs

You pay per connected webshop, not per printer and not per rule. On that one computer you connect as many printers as you like. Two webshops is twice the monthly amount, and you pay exactly the days a webshop is connected.

More about how the whole thing works is in the welcome chapter, and choosing a printer is covered in choosing your printer.