Most order chaos starts in a spreadsheet. A sale comes in at eleven at night, you copy the customer’s color choice into a notes column, you eyeball which printer is free, and you hope you grabbed the right file in the morning. AutoPrintFarm replaces that loop. Connect your store once, tell it which print file each product is, and orders route themselves — straight into the queue, with material and due date attached.
Here’s the whole setup.
What you’ll need
- An AutoPrintFarm account on the Pro plan — Etsy and Shopify sync is included, with no cut of your sales and no per-order charge. See pricing for the full breakdown.
- Your printers already online via the hub. If you haven’t done that yet, start with connecting your first printers.
- Admin access to the Etsy shop or Shopify store you want to connect.
Step 1 — Connect the store
In the dashboard, open the integrations panel and pick Etsy or Shopify. You’ll be sent to your store to authorize the connection, then dropped right back. That’s the entire OAuth dance — no API keys to paste, no webhook URLs to wire up by hand.
Connect once. From then on, new paid orders flow in automatically, and you can connect both channels (and WooCommerce) side by side in the same workspace.
Step 2 — Map products to print files
A storefront listing isn’t a print job until AutoPrintFarm knows what to make. So for each product you sell, you map the listing to a print file.
- Match a Shopify product or Etsy listing to the file the printer should run.
- Set the material it prints in — the filament type and the color — so a “Midnight Blue” variant always pulls the right spool.
- For products with variants, map each variant to its own file or color. The “Large / Red” option and the “Small / Black” option can resolve to completely different jobs.
You only do this once per product. Map it now and every future sale of that listing inherits the mapping.
Step 3 — Let orders land in the queue
This is where the work disappears. When a customer checks out, the order arrives in AutoPrintFarm as a real job — not a row to retype. Each one shows up in the queue with:
- The print file to run, pulled from your product mapping.
- The material required, so you never start a 14-hour print on the wrong color.
- A due date derived from the order, so the oldest commitments rise to the top instead of getting buried.
From there you approve and dispatch to any open printer, or let the queue line jobs up for you. You approve. It runs. Watch it on the floor, get a push alert the moment a print fails, and the order’s status follows the print all the way to done.
Step 4 — Check your worklist
Once orders are flowing, the worklist becomes your morning view: every open order across every channel, sorted by what’s due, with the material each one needs already attached. No tab-switching between Etsy and Shopify, no mental math on which spool to load first. It’s the same picture whether one sale came in or thirty.
What if my internet drops?
Orders sync the moment your connection comes back. Anything already printing keeps going — the job lives on the printer itself — and any sales that landed while you were offline catch up automatically on reconnect. You won’t miss an order because the Wi-Fi blinked.
That’s the loop closed: a Sunday-night sale becomes a queued job with the right material and a due date, with nothing retyped in between. To see how the floor and the storefront share one workspace, read about how the whole system fits together, or dig into the commerce side.