A well-organized print queue is the difference between a print farm that hums along predictably and one that constantly requires manual intervention. When jobs land in the right queue on the right printers without anyone sorting them, your operators can focus on running machines instead of managing spreadsheets. Connecting Shopify orders directly to the correct SimplyPrint printer group is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your production workflow.
How Queue Assignment Works in SimplyPrint
SimplyPrint organizes printers into groups. A group might represent a set of printers loaded with the same filament type, a tier of machines reserved for high-detail work, or a physical section of your farm dedicated to a particular product line. When you create a print job, you assign it to one of these groups, and SimplyPrint routes it to the next available printer within that group.
This structure is powerful because it abstracts the job creation from the specific machine. You do not need to know which printer is free — SimplyPrint tracks that. You only need to know which group the job belongs to. That is the information that gets embedded in each job when SimplyPrintSync creates it automatically.
How SimplyPrintSync Assigns Jobs to Queues
When you map a Shopify product to a print file in SimplyPrintSync, you also specify which SimplyPrint printer group that product should use. This is set once per product (or per variant, if different variants need different printers) and then applied automatically to every future order.
For example, you might configure your PETG products to route to a printer group called "PETG Farm" while your PLA products go to "PLA Standard." A customer ordering one PETG and one PLA product in the same cart will generate two print jobs, each correctly assigned to its respective printer group — all without any manual sorting.
This mapping is stored in SimplyPrintSync's product configuration, so it travels with the product definition and is applied consistently across every order, regardless of when the order comes in or who is on shift.
Benefits of Automated Queue Assignment
The benefits extend beyond saving a few minutes per order. Automated queue assignment enforces consistency. When a human sorts jobs into queues manually, they can make mistakes — especially at the end of a long shift or during a busy period. A job sent to the wrong printer group might sit idle because those printers are not loaded with the right material, or worse, get printed in the wrong material and need to be redone.
Automation removes this error vector entirely. The printer group is determined by the product configuration, set once by someone who knows the production requirements, and then applied without variation to every order. Your quality standards are encoded into the system rather than depending on individual operator memory.
Automated assignment also makes scaling easier. When you add new printers to a group, those machines automatically start receiving jobs from all the products mapped to that group. You do not need to update any order processing rules — the new capacity is absorbed immediately.
Advanced Mode for Stock-Based Queue Management
Sometimes you do not want every order to trigger a print job. If you keep a buffer stock of popular items, you want to fulfil orders from existing inventory until stock drops low enough that reprinting makes sense. SimplyPrintSync's Advanced mode handles this automatically.
In Advanced mode, you set a minimum stock threshold for each product. When an order comes in and the current Shopify inventory is above that threshold, SimplyPrintSync skips job creation — it assumes you have stock to ship. When inventory falls to or below the threshold, print jobs start creating automatically again. Combined with automatic queue assignment, this means your production queue stays lean: only jobs that genuinely need to be printed are added, and they land in exactly the right place.
Getting Started with Queue Automation
Setting up automated queue assignment takes only a few minutes. Install SimplyPrintSync from the Shopify App Store, connect your SimplyPrint API key in settings, then go to the Products page. For each product, select the SimplyPrint file and choose the printer group from a dropdown populated with your actual SimplyPrint groups. Save the mapping, place a test order, and watch the job appear in the correct queue.
SimplyPrintSync's Free plan supports up to 10 print job creations per month, which is enough to validate the workflow end to end. The Basic plan ($5/month) covers 100 jobs, and the Professional plan ($20/month) is unlimited. Every plan starts with a 30-day free trial.
