How to Print a Pick List in Shopify Without an App
If you're shipping a handful of orders a day, you don't need to pay for anything to get a printed list to work from. You can print a pick list without an app — or more precisely, without a paid third-party app — using tools Shopify already gives you. This guide walks through the two free routes, shows exactly where each one stops being enough, and helps you decide when a dedicated pick-and-pack tool actually earns its keep.
We build Picksort, a Shopify pick-and-pack app, so we're not going to pretend the free options don't exist — plenty of small stores run on them happily for a long time. The honest answer is that "without an app" is really "without a paid app," and knowing the difference saves you both money and wasted afternoons.
Option 1: Print packing slips straight from the Orders page
The fastest free route uses nothing but the core Shopify admin. Every store has it, and there's nothing to install.
- Open Orders in your Shopify admin.
- Tick the checkbox next to each unfulfilled order you want to pick.
- Click More actions, then Print packing slips.
- Shopify builds a print-ready document in your browser — hit print.
This gives you one packing slip per order. It's clean, it's free, and it's perfectly good for packing — matching items to a box at the bench. The catch is that it isn't really a pick list. Print forty orders and you get forty pages, and the bestseller that appears on half of them is scattered across the whole stack. You end up walking back to the same shelf again and again. We cover that trade-off in more depth in our guide to printing a pick list in Shopify.
Option 2: Use Shopify's free Order Printer app
Shopify's first-party Order Printer app is free, and it's a step up because it includes an actual pick list template alongside packing slips and invoices. Because it's made by Shopify, it counts as "close enough to no app" for most merchants — you're not signing up for another subscription.
How to print a pick list with Order Printer
- Install the free Order Printer app from the Shopify App Store.
- From Orders, select the orders you want to pick.
- Choose More actions → Print with Order Printer.
- Pick the pick list template and print.
Order Printer will combine the selected orders' line items into a single list, which is genuinely useful — it's more than the raw packing-slip route gives you. It also prints roughly 50 orders at a time, so very large batches need splitting. If you're weighing it against paid tools, we compare the specifics in our Shopify Order Printer alternative write-up.
Where the free templates run out of road
Both free options share the same ceiling. To change the layout — bigger quantities, checkoff boxes, a sort order that follows your shelves, grouping by vendor or bin — you have to edit the template's Liquid/HTML code by hand. That's doable if you're comfortable in code, but it's fiddly to maintain, and it still won't dynamically re-tally quantities the way a purpose-built tool does.
The real limitation: free tools don't merge by SKU for you
Here's the crux. Free Shopify printing is built around the order as the unit. Even Order Printer's pick list leans on the selected orders rather than giving you a true running total per product across everything that's open. For single-item stores that's fine. For a store where the same SKU shows up across dozens of orders, the missing piece is a quantity-per-SKU pick sheet — one line per product, with the total quantity you need to pull for the entire batch.
Without that merge, someone on your team is doing the tallying in their head or on a scratch pad: "Blue tee — three here, two there, one on that slip… so eight total." It works, but it's slow and it's exactly where miscounts creep in.
Free vs. paid: an honest comparison
| Native packing slips | Order Printer (free) | Merged pick-and-pack app | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free | Paid (e.g. $9/mo) |
| Install needed | None | Free app | App |
| Output | One slip per order | Per-order list / basic pick list | One quantity-per-SKU sheet |
| Tallying by SKU | You do it | Mostly you do it | Done for you, re-tallies live |
| Group by vendor / bin | No | Code edits only | Built in, one click |
| Best for | A few orders/day | Light batches, some coding OK | Dozens of orders, shared SKUs |
Notice there's no villain here. The free tools are the right answer at low volume or when your orders rarely share products. The paid tier earns its place only once the manual tallying starts costing you real minutes every day.
How to decide what you need today
- Stick with native slips if you ship a few orders a day and mostly one item each — the browser print button is all you need.
- Add free Order Printer if you want a combined item list for a selected batch and don't mind basic styling (or light template editing).
- Move to a merged app once you're batching dozens of orders that share SKUs, re-walking shelves, or hand-counting totals — that's the point where a tool that tallies for you pays for itself.
If option three sounds like you, that's the exact gap Picksort fills: it reads your open, unfulfilled orders and merges them into one printable quantity-per-SKU sheet — grouped by vendor, bin, or SKU, with checkoff boxes and big quantities. It's read-only, so it never touches your orders, and there's nothing to import or configure. For a broader look at what's out there, our roundup of the best Shopify pick list apps covers the field even-handedly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you print a pick list in Shopify without an app?
Yes. Shopify's free Order Printer app includes a built-in pick list template, and you can print plain packing slips straight from the Orders page with no third-party install. Both are genuinely no-cost. The limits are that the layouts are basic and they don't merge orders into one quantity-per-SKU total — you still pick order by order unless you edit the template code yourself.
Does Shopify have a built-in pick list?
Shopify's free, first-party Order Printer app has a pick list template you can select and print for a batch of selected orders. It isn't switched on in the core admin by default, but installing Order Printer costs nothing. It prints a combined item list, though the styling and grouping options are limited compared with a dedicated pick-and-pack app.
How do I print a packing slip in Shopify for free?
From your admin, open Orders, tick the orders you want, then choose More actions and Print packing slips (or use the Order Printer app for a customizable template). Shopify generates a print-ready document in your browser at no cost. It's one slip per order, so it's best for packing rather than batch picking.
When is a pick list app worth paying for?
When hand-counting quantities across a stack of slips starts eating real time — often somewhere around 15 to 30 orders a day. A paid app that merges every open order into one quantity-per-SKU sheet removes the manual tallying and re-walking. Below that volume, Shopify's free printing is usually fine.
So, can you print a pick list without a paid app? Absolutely — start with Shopify's free tools and push them as far as they'll go. When the tallying and re-walking start costing you more than a coffee's worth of time each day, Picksort merges it all into one clean sheet, and you can start a 30-day free trial to see whether it's worth the upgrade for your store.