Step by Step Guide to Printing Receipts for Customers in WooCommerce

Even in an increasingly digital age, printed receipts remain popular. Many customers prefer a physical receipt to a digital one for various reasons. For customers, printed receipts provide a point of reference to check order accuracy and act as proof of purchase for tax purposes as well as refunds and returns. Businesses often use them as a means to advertise promotions and discounts.

WooCommerce doesn’t have built-in functionality for receipt printing, but fortunately, there are many plugins available that can bring this utility to your WooCommerce store. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at why printed receipts are so important, some of the best plugins you can use to add this functionality to your store, and how to set up and print custom receipts using our recommended solution.

Why print receipts in WooCommerce?

Printing receipts for customers has numerous benefits:

Ensure order accuracy

The ability to print receipts in WooCommerce is tied to customer convenience and satisfaction. Customers can handily cross-reference their purchases against a printed receipt when they receive their order, whether at the POS or when they take delivery of goods ordered online.

Printed receipts are also useful in the fulfillment process. Fulfillment staff can use a printed receipt to check that all items in an order are correct before it goes out to the customer (e.g., before taking an order out to a restaurant customer, or while picking items for delivery).

Provide proof of purchase

Customers may ask retailers for physical receipts to add to their records for tax purposes, where such documents serve as proof to claim business expenses. Physical receipts also make it easy to handle returns or refunds in case customers change their minds about their purchases.

Augment marketing

Printed receipts are a great place to include company branding, which can help to make your business look more professional, and even encourage repeat business or referrals. Customizing your printed receipts also gives you the opportunity to include information about future promotions, or even add interactive elements like QR codes.

How do you print receipts in WooCommerce? (Top 3 plugins)

By default, WooCommerce doesn’t include the functionality to print receipts for your customers. To print receipts in WooCommerce, you’ll need a plugin. Choosing a suitable plugin for printing receipts can be complicated as you will need a solution that has all the functionality your business requires and integrates well with your existing hardware and software. We’ve included our three top picks for WooCommerce receipt printing plugins below:

BizPrint

BizPrint is an all-in-one automatic printing solution from BizSwoop that allows you to print documents your business will need throughout the order fulfillment process. As well as allowing you to automatically print receipts directly at the point of sale or to your fulfillment center or restaurant kitchen, BizPrint also supports the printing of VAT invoices, pick lists, packing slips, delivery notes, and various other types of business documents. Here are just some of the features that make BizPrint stand out from the competition:

Automatic printing

BizPrint is one of the few WooCommerce printing solutions to offer automatic printing functionality, which is a game-changer when it comes to order fulfillment efficiency and improved customer experience. The moment a new order is placed, the plugin uses the order details to create a receipt based on your customized template and automatically prints it. You can set BizPrint up to print receipts at your point of sale (POS), fulfillment center, restaurant kitchen, or elsewhere, depending on the needs of your business.

You can configure BizPrint to trigger automatic printing at a predetermined order status to ensure the printing of your documents fits perfectly into your order fulfillment workflow. By pairing BizPrint with Flow Notify, also from BizSwoop, you can set custom order statuses to fine-tune the automatic printing process. In cases where you don’t want to automatically print your receipts, BizPrint also supports manual printing of documents, individually or in bulk.

Works with all printers

BizPrint is designed to work with all printer models, including the leading brands of thermal printers like Epson, Star, and Zebra. You can avoid any upfront costs of adding receipt printing functionality to your WooCommerce store, while also gaining benefits from thermal receipt printers, such as:

Lower running and maintenance costs
Faster printing times
More compact, which is perfect for retail, warehouse, or kitchen environments, as well as on-the-go receipt printing at markets, trade shows, and pop-ups

Customizable templates

BizPrint comes with a range of customizable templates that allow you to add business branding, company policy, personalized messages, and more to your receipts and order fulfillment documents. BizPrint’s templates include customizable fields, but if you need something more specific, you can request a bespoke template for your eCommerce store.

Alternatively, if you have a developer in-house, you can use custom hooks and filters to make adjustments to the existing BizPrint templates, including the functionality to add interactive elements like barcodes or QR codes. They’re great for linking customers to surveys, coupons, social media promotions, and more.

Integration with POS

As the functionality to print receipts in WooCommerce is particularly important for in-person sales, whichever plugin you choose for printing must integrate well with your POS system. BizPrint is designed to work with any WooCommerce POS system you choose but has particularly strong integration with sister plugin Jovvie.

Jovvie is a highly flexible POS plugin that makes it easy to sell anywhere, whether in-store, online, or on the go. It comes packed with a robust feature set that makes it one of the best WooCommerce POS plugins available. By pairing Jovvie with BizPrint, you can accept orders from anywhere and trigger automatic receipt printing either right at the point of sale or at whichever fulfillment center you need.

BizPrint has a flexible pricing structure, starting at $3/month, depending on the number of prints you need. A scalable solution, BizPrint suits businesses of any size and shape.

Print Invoices & Delivery Notes for WooCommerce

As its name suggests, Print Invoices & Delivery Notes for WooCommerce allows you to manually print invoices and delivery notes directly from your WooCommerce orders page. You can set it up for manual or bulk printing of invoices or delivery notes from within your WooCommerce dashboard.

The plugin comes with customizable delivery notes and invoice templates, though you will need some knowledge of custom CSS. It also offers support for simple invoice numbering and sequential order numbers.

Print Invoices & Delivery Notes for WooCommerce is a free plugin and a good choice for businesses that do not have a need to print order fulfillment documents beyond invoices and delivery notes. Unlike BizPrint, the plugin does not offer automatic printing functionality, which means it cannot contribute to improving checkout efficiency and the customer experience at your WooCommerce store in the same way.

WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips

WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips is a free WooCommerce printing solution that allows you to generate invoices and packing slips directly from your WooCommerce order page, which you can then manually print. It automatically attaches PDF invoices to order confirmation emails, which is great if most of your customers want only digital proof of purchase or requests for payment from you.

The WooCommerce plugin comes with customizable HTML/CSS templates for invoices and packing slips. Premium extensions bring automatic printing and additional functionality, such as automatic uploading to Dropbox and support for credit notes and proforma invoices.

While WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips is a free solution, its functionality is somewhat limited without the premium extensions, which really unlock the potential of the plugin as a WooCommerce printing solution. These extensions don’t come cheap – the premium extension to unlock the advanced features of the plugin starts at $59/year, and automatic order printing through PrintNode costs $68.50/year. Considering BizPrint comes with most of these features and more as standard, WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips do not compare favorably.

Step-by-step guide to printing receipts in WooCommerce using BizPrint

Users are able to have BizPrint up and running for auto-printing receipts in a matter of minutes. Use this tutorial as a guide:

Download, install, and set up the plugin

1. Create your free BizSwoop account. Activate your account from your email.

2. Login to your account. On the BizPrint dashboard, add a print station. Your public and secret keys will be generated. Copy them.

3. Download and install the BizPrint app (Windows/Mac OS/Linux OS/Raspberry PI OS). Launch the app. When prompted, add your public and secret keys – they are needed to register and connect your printers to BizPrint.

4. On your WordPress Admin dashboard, install the BizPrint Print Manager WordPress plugin. Alternatively, you can download Print Manager and upload the plugin zip file to WP.

5. Under WooCommerce > Print Manager > Application, once again paste your public and secret keys. This will connect your website to BizPrint.

6. Add new locations and select printers. You’re done!

The visual quick start guide is available on the BizPrint website.

Customize the receipt template

The next step is to choose a receipt template from the free BizPrint templates available for WooCommerce store owners.

More custom receipts are available at the BizPrint marketplace.

Customer receipts are a branding tool. They reinforce your logo and messages, helping build greater familiarity with your brand and encouraging people to continue buying from you. As BizPrint picks the information to put on receipts directly from your WooCommerce orders, you only need to add brand elements, or any additional information, to your receipt template.

BizPrint offers you full control over the way you want to print receipts in WooCommerce. You can change the font size and weight, and add custom margins to create bespoke receipts, packing lists, invoices, delivery notes, and other documents.

Add barcodes

A barcode on a receipt provides information related to the sale, including the time and date of purchase, item price, payment method, store number (in case of multiple store locations), and other details. Retailers use barcodes or QR codes on receipts to link customers to surveys.

If you’re interested in adding barcodes to the receipts generated using BizPrint, you can do so in two ways:

Add a WordPress action and hook to display the field on a specific location on the default print templates provided in the plugin.
Develop a custom print template with BizPrint’s developer documentation as a guide (or in collaboration with BizPrint using their template development service).

To generate barcodes, you can use A4 Barcode Generator, which allows you to print barcode labels manually or import them from orders.

Set up automatic printing

Once your receipt customization is complete, decide if you want BizPrint to print receipts in WooCommerce automatically or if you want to print orders manually. You can enable auto printing under WooCommerce > General.

Use Flow Notify to notify customers about their order status

Customers are accustomed to receiving emails or SMS notifications about their order status. Along with providing customers with a physical receipt as proof of purchase, you can also send them online notifications with updates about their order status.

You can use Flow Notify to set up automatic notifications based on specific order status. For example, you could trigger an SMS or email notification to be sent to a customer when their order has been shipped from your fulfillment center. Like BizPrint, Flow Notify also offers manual functionality, allowing you to send one-off notifications, which is great for promotions or on-the-fly order updates.

Auto-print your WooCommerce order receipts with BizPrint

Printed receipts help improve order picking accuracy, make refunds and returns smoother, serve as proof to claim business expenses and cut tax bills, and contribute to your business branding efforts.

A good receipt printing plugin offers customizable templates, integration with your existing hardware/software, and advanced functionality like automatic printing to help improve your business efficiency and customer experience. BizPrint ticks all the boxes:

Automatic printing functionality
Works with all printer models
Comes with fully customizable templates
Integrates with your POS, offering especially tight integration with Jovvie

BizPrint is a great plugin to print receipts in WooCommerce. Multiple free templates and paid custom templates make it a one-stop solution for automatically generating physical copies of various documents your business shares with customers. A scalable pricing structure accommodates your budget, no matter the size of your business. Get started and see how BizPrint can help take your WooCommerce store to the next level.

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