The point of all the machinery is that you stop pressing print. Two paths get you there: labels fired by your own automation rules while the show is running, and shipping labels that print themselves the moment an order is ready to go out.
When the marketplace produces the shipping label for an order, we notice at the one point in the pipeline where that becomes true and send it to whichever printer owns shipping labels. What prints is the carrier document itself, exactly as issued, not a redrawn imitation of it. Nobody opens an order screen and nobody downloads a PDF. This path runs on our servers, so it does not wait for your browser.
A parcel that was packed before you set a printer up, or one whose label went through the machine crooked, prints again from the shipment itself. It is the same carrier document down the same tracked pipeline, it picks the right one when a parcel has both a single and a combined version, and if it genuinely cannot reach a printer it hands you the document to open instead of reporting a success that did not happen.
The slip for the same order is composed and printed alongside the shipping label, on its own printer if you claimed one for packing slips. The two halves of a parcel arrive at the packing table together.
Printing is one of the actions your automation rules can take when something happens in the show, alongside announcing in chat, sending an email and the rest. This path runs through the extension on your show tab, which is the one thing guaranteed to be open while you are live.
A setup card asks which kinds of label you want printing, once, before the show. The answer is stored for your whole team and every surface reads it, so the extension and the website always agree about what is supposed to happen.
The test print is a real tracked job, not a browser print dialog pretending to be one. If the printer does not confirm within thirty seconds it says so, rather than showing a tick because the request was sent.
If you say "not now" to printer setup and go live anyway, the labels still queue. When somebody eventually claims a printer, the backlog drains and prints. Deferring costs you the timing, not the work.
Automatic printing ignores anything older than a day. The first time you turn it on, the sync that follows would otherwise physically print every shipping label your account has ever had, which is an expensive way to learn about a feature.
Each shipment is marked the moment its label is queued, so the pipelines that re-examine orders on every sync pass cannot print the same label a second time.
The auto-print step cannot fail the shipment it is attached to. If the printer is unreachable, your order data is still saved and the print failure is recorded on its own, rather than a paper jam rolling back an order record.