Time is your scarcest resource. You can buy more printers, hire more operators, and source better filament — but you cannot buy more hours. For 3D printing businesses that sell through Shopify, a surprising portion of those hours disappears into a task that produces no product and no customer value: manually creating print jobs from orders. Order automation gives those hours back.
What Manual Order Processing Actually Costs You
The cost of manual processing is easy to underestimate because it accumulates in small increments. A single order takes about five minutes to process manually — open SimplyPrint, locate the correct file, create a job, enter the quantity, assign the printer group, save. It does not feel like much.
But the math compounds quickly. At twenty orders per week, that is one hour and forty minutes of pure administrative time. At fifty orders per week, it exceeds four hours. At a hundred orders per week — a realistic volume for a growing shop — you are spending nearly ten hours a week on a task that requires no skill, no judgment, and no creativity. That is more than a full workday, every single week, devoted entirely to data entry.
And that calculation assumes everything goes smoothly. It does not account for the extra time spent on errors — jobs created with the wrong file, wrong quantity, or wrong printer group that have to be caught and corrected.
What SimplyPrintSync Automates
SimplyPrintSync automates every step between "order paid in Shopify" and "print job created in SimplyPrint." Specifically, it handles:
- Job creation. A print job is created in SimplyPrint automatically when Shopify confirms payment. No manual trigger required.
- File attachment. The correct print file — which you configure once per product or variant — is attached to every job automatically.
- Quantity calculation. The order quantity is divided by the configured yield (units per print run) to determine the correct number of jobs to create.
- Printer group assignment. Each job is routed to the correct printer group based on the product mapping, so FDM jobs go to FDM printers, resin jobs go to resin printers, and so on.
- Sync logging. Every job creation is recorded with a timestamp and linked to the originating Shopify order, giving you a full audit trail with no extra effort.
What You Still Do Manually — and Should
Automation should not mean removing humans from the process entirely. Some steps genuinely require a person's judgment and should remain manual. Quality inspection is the clearest example: no system can reliably detect a subtle layer shift, an under-extruded section, or a support structure that failed to detach cleanly. That requires eyes and hands.
Packing and shipping also benefit from human attention. Fragile prints need appropriate cushioning. Oversized items may need special handling. Customers with notes on their orders need those notes acted on. These are the steps where human involvement adds real value.
The goal is not to automate everything — it is to automate the things that do not benefit from human involvement, so the humans in your business can spend their time on the things that do.
The ROI of Order Automation
If you value your time at $25 per hour — a conservative figure for most business owners — four hours of weekly time savings is worth $100 per week. Over a month, that is $400 in recovered time. SimplyPrintSync's Professional plan costs $20 per month.
Even at the more modest end — say, two hours saved per week at $25 per hour — the monthly value of the automation is $200 against a $20 subscription. The return on investment is substantial at any realistic volume, and it increases as your order count grows because the time cost of manual processing scales with orders while the subscription cost does not.
Start with the Free Plan
If you are not yet convinced that order automation will work for your specific setup, the Free plan lets you test it at zero cost. Ten print job creations per month is enough to run a genuine test across several products and order configurations, verify that jobs appear correctly in SimplyPrint, and confirm that the workflow integrates cleanly with how your team operates. When you are ready to scale, the Basic plan ($5/month) covers 100 jobs, and Professional ($20/month) is unlimited. All plans include a 30-day free trial.
