Retailers running both a physical store and a Shopify shop face a specific challenge: staying on top of new online orders while the team is busy on the shop floor. Trail.NL, a trail running specialty store in Amsterdam, uses Printout Designer to automate packing slip printing directly from Shopify, keeping fulfillment running smoothly even when staff are occupied with in-store customers.
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Trail.NL has been a specialist in trail, ultra, and light hiking gear since 2013, run by a team of runners themselves. Its range covers trail shoes, hydration vests, sports nutrition, and everything else a trail runner needs for training and racing. Selling gear is only part of it: organized trail runs and social runs, international running trips, and a WhatsApp community for runners’ questions are all part of how Trail.NL stays connected to the sport.
The Challenge: Staying on top of orders on a busy shop floor
Trail.NL fulfills orders from two directions at once: customers walking into the Amsterdam store, and orders coming in through Shopify. For every online order, a packing slip prints through Printout Designer, with a barcode scanned to confirm the right product went into the box. Invoices are handled separately, entirely digitally, through the customer’s Shopify account or an email confirmation.
Before automating, staying on top of the Shopify side while running the physical store wasn’t always straightforward.
“You have a few customers in store, then you get distracted, then you forget that online orders come in. It doesn’t come out of the printer, so you have to do it manually. You check, you forget it, you don’t ship it the same day.”
What the team needed was a way to know the moment a new order came in, without having to keep checking the computer for it.
The Solution: Packing slips that print themselves
With Printout Designer, packing slips now print automatically the moment an order comes in, sent straight to the printer through PrintNode.
“When an order comes in, it comes out of the printer automatically. We also see, oh wait, there’s a new order to be picked.”
The sound of the printer replaced the need to actively watch for new orders. From there, staff scan each product with the Shopify POS app on iPhone while picking in the warehouse, then check it off against the packing slip before it ships.
What makes this work for Trail.NL specifically is how much of the packing slip they were able to shape themselves. Printout Designer’s drag and drop editor lets customers build a template around their own workflow, down to small details that matter on the warehouse floor, like showing the quantity needed for each item in red so it’s easy to catch while picking, and a highlighted total item count so staff can double check nothing’s missing before it ships.
Small packages caused a different kind of problem:
“Sometimes the package is small, so you fold it, and the barcode ends up in half, so you have to open it up. So we moved the barcode to the left.”
Small adjustments like this, made directly in the editor without needing any development help, brought picking mistakes down to close to zero.
The Impact: Time, and mental space, back
Before automating, checking for new orders meant repeatedly going back to the computer to refresh the page and print manually.
“Was it like 30 seconds, 10 times a day, 20 times a day? It’s not hours per day, but might be hours per month.”
Beyond the time itself, Dirk pointed to a benefit that’s harder to measure directly: no longer needing to hold the process in the back of his mind.
“It’s also saving mental capacity. Oh, I have to check the printer, I have to check if there are new orders. It’s just, oh, the printer is humming, new order, let’s pick it.”
For Trail.NL, both of those gains came without much overhead on the team’s side. Setting up Printout Designer didn’t take long, and once the workflow was in place, it needed little attention to keep running.
“I don’t think I needed to read a manual to make it work. It’s easy and straightforward.”
That same low-maintenance quality is why Dirk sees it as worth recommending more broadly, not a tool to actively manage, but one that keeps working quietly in the background once it’s set up.
“If you like to automate stuff, it’s easy, it works. Once it works, don’t touch it.”
Conclusion
By automating Shopify packing slip printing with Printout Designer, Trail.NL turned a distraction-prone manual process into something the team barely has to think about. Orders print themselves, picking mistakes are down, and staff can stay focused on the shop floor and the running community the store is built around.
