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How to print order info after placement using Shopify Flow?

How to print order info after placement using Shopify Flow?

m1mike
Visitor
2 0 2

Hey everyone,

Has anyone used Shopify Flow to print order information after an order has been placed? Ideally, would would like to print the pick list that we using in Order Printer. If anyone could point me in the direction of an app or apps to use I'd appreciate it. 

 

Thanks

Reply 1 (1)

RobDukarski
Shopify Partner
88 15 20

@m1mike 

Not personally but if your printer can accept an email-based print job you could potentially send it an email with the order information.

I'm not very familiar with printers and honestly believe they are the one of the most difficult-to-use and troubleshoot consumer products... That said, I believe I have read or heard that some can accept an email and print the contents or attachment and I'm guessing some may even have API-based printing enabled where you could send a request to a URL to have it print the payload or something like that.

An HTTP request example could be where you setup a custom API that listens for specific requests with the order printer URL in the payload that looks something like this:

https://example.myshopify.com/admin/apps/SPECIFIC ID/ANOTHER SPECIFIC ID/orders/ORDER ID/

 
The "SPECIFIC ID", "ANOTHER SPECIFIC ID", and "ORDER ID" may be specific to you. I'm not entirely sure but my guess is that those specific IDs might be the App ID and the merchant ID (may be specific to the app) for specific use with that App. You should be able to just grab the URL from an order in the app and then replace the order ID with the Liquid variable in the body of the request so that it uses the ID specific to each new order.

Anyway, then your API could potentially spin up a web browser, log in to your Shopify admin back-end, load that Order Printer page, save the content as a PDF, and then send an email with that PDF attached. If you have a spare computer connected to the printer you could probably have the API run on it and directly print the documents automatically.

That all assumes you would be able to spin up a web browser and login to Shopify using it from an automated script. (I recommend Node.js and Puppeteer, though I have not worked with Puppeteer in a while.) It might be a better idea to use the Webhooks directly to connect to a custom API instead of Shopify Flow for this but it is up to you.

Hope that helps!

- Rob Dukarski
Helping to make commerce better for everyone!