Fulfillment modes

This is the most important decision when you set up a store. It controls what happens the moment an order is paid. There are two modes.

Immediate

Every paid order becomes its own invoice and job, right away.

The shopper checks out, the payment clears, and ManagePrint immediately creates:

An invoice, marked paid, with the buyer’s tax carried across.
A production job, ready on your board, one part per line item.
A customer record, matched or created from the order’s email.

Use immediate mode for a normal online store where each order is independent and you want to start producing as soon as money’s in.

Group order

Orders pool until the store closes, then consolidate into one invoice and one job.

While the store is open, paid orders accumulate, no invoices or jobs yet. When the store closes, ManagePrint consolidates every paid, non-refunded order at once:

Identical line items are merged by product, size, and color, and their quantities summed, so 30 people buying the same shirt in size L becomes one line of 30.
One invoice and one multi-part job are created for the whole batch, one part per merged line.
The invoice bills to the store’s contact details. No customer record is created, by design, so a 100-person team store doesn’t mint 100 customers.
The store is set inactive and stays that way. Closing is a one-way door.

Use group order mode for team stores and fundraisers, where you want to gang up a single production run after everyone’s had a chance to order.

Tax carries onto the consolidated invoice. The tax every buyer actually paid at checkout is summed across the batch and added to the invoice, with a blended tax rate derived from that total. Both fulfillment modes now report revenue correctly.

Closing a group-order store

Two ways to close, and they behave differently.

By hand. Open the store and hit Close store now. It consolidates on the spot. This is the predictable option.

Auto-close. Turn on the Auto-close on Close Date toggle (it’s off by default) and a background job closes the store for you.

Auto-close checks every 15 minutes for stores whose close date and close time have passed, in the store’s time zone (set on the store, see Creating a store). Leave close time blank and the store gets the whole close date, closing at the following midnight in that zone. The shopper countdown counts down to that same instant, so what buyers see matches when the store actually shuts.

Closing a store with zero paid orders is harmless. It’s marked closed and no invoice is created.

What the shopper is told

The order confirmation screen and the confirmation email are the same in both modes. Every buyer, group order included, is told “Production has been scheduled.” There is currently no message telling group-order shoppers that production starts after the store closes. If that expectation matters, set it yourself in the store’s description or headline.

Pick before you launch

Because the two modes create invoices and jobs at different times, you lock the mode once the store has a paid order. Choose deliberately when you create the store. When in doubt: one-off store, immediate; everyone-orders-then-we-print, group order.