Floristflow

Printing Shopify orders automatically

Most order-printing apps make a PDF. Somebody still has to open it and press print. On a Saturday morning with forty arrangements to make, that person is the bottleneck — and the order that gets missed is the one nobody opened.

What automatic has to mean

  • The order arrives and the ticket appears. No tab, no dashboard, no one remembering.
  • On your paper. Florist tickets are usually a perforated sheet torn into panels — one for the arrangement, one for the shop, one that goes in the card. Floristflow places every panel on the perforations of a three-panel US Legal sheet.
  • Everything the bench needs. Card message, flower notes, colours, recipient, delivery window. If a field is missing from the ticket somebody has to go and look it up.
  • A record when it fails. Paper jams and computers sleep. A failed print has to say so on the order, not sit in a log nobody thinks to check — the whole point of a printer is that nobody is watching it.
  • Reprints. Tickets get lost, spilled on and thrown away. Reprinting one should take a click from the day’s run.

What it needs on your side

Cloud software cannot reach a printer on your shop’s network by itself, so something has to bridge the two. Floristflow prints through PrintNode, which means a small client runs on the computer your printer is attached to.

Print ticket in Shopify POS is the exception: it opens the POS device’s own print dialog, so it prints to whatever printer that iPad or phone can reach, not through PrintNode.

That detail matters more than it sounds, so it is worth saying plainly rather than in a footnote: the client has to be running on the machine the printer is plugged into. Starting it on a different computer connects that computer and nothing else, and the printer list stays empty while every printer still reports itself as online.

More than one counter

Shops with a second location can give each one its own printer, so a sale rung up there, or an online pickup chosen for it, comes out where the arrangement is being made rather than wherever the shop printer happens to be. A website delivery follows the counter that serves its address for hours, areas and closures, and prints on the shop printer.

See the whole app, or read about delivery date selection.

Early access

Floristflow starts at $59 a month — one app, one bill.