Editing and printing invoices

Both you and your customers can print out an invoice for each order. An invoice is a summary of order details that confirms a successful order placement. You can keep invoices for your records or use them as packing slips to ensure that all ordered products are inside a box before it's shipped out. You can also include printed invoices in shipments or save them as PDF and resend to your customers if needed.

You can add a logo, a tax ID, a footer message or extra business information to your invoice, if you like. You can also additionally customize the invoice template so that it meets your specific business needs.

Introducing the default invoice template

Ecwid uses a default template for the invoice — it is created to be universal and to fit any business. This template contains the following information: your company name and address (taken from your store profile), the buyer’s name and ship-to address, the payment method and shipping method they’ve chosen for their order, information about the ordered products and an itemized order total.

A default invoice can differ slightly for merchants from different countries. To preview an invoice that is generated in your store, go to Settings → Invoice (or Settings → Printable Order).

You can use Ecwid's built-in options to add a store logo, include your company’s tax registration ID, provide additional business details or add a footer message to your default invoice. If you need to make more changes, you can customize the invoice template so that it fits your specific business needs.

The invoice is composed in your store language (and not in the language of your Ecwid admin).

Printing invoices

Your customers can view and print invoices for their orders from several places:

• They can generate an invoice by clicking the Print order link in the “Thank you for your order!” page that they see after placing an order.
• They can print an invoice for any order from their order history after they log into their customer account in your store.
• Customers can also receive invoices as attachments to the Order confirmation emails. To send invoices with your order confirmations, go to Settings → Notifications and enable the Attach invoices to Order confirmation email setting.

As the store administrator, you can view invoices for any order in the My Sales → Orders section. You can save them as PDF files or print the invoices for your records or to include in your shipments.

If you want to print multiple invoices at once:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to My Sales → Orders.
2. Select orders by placing a check mark next to them.
3. Choose Print Selected from the Mass Update dropdown:
   

   

Adding a logo to the invoice

You can add your company's logo to the invoices. Adding a logo helps personalize your invoices and can be a part of your brand building. The recommended size of a logo image is 240 x 100 px.

To add a logo to the invoice template:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Invoice (or Settings → Printable Order).
2. Click Upload Invoice Logo and choose the image file from your computer.

The changes will be autosaved.

The logo will be displayed in the top left corner of your invoice. You can check the result on the preview.

If you want to upload a different image, click Change Invoice Logo and choose another image from your computer. To delete the image from your invoice template, click on the basket icon in the Logo section.

Adding your tax registration number to the invoice

In some countries, merchants that charge taxes need to show their tax identification number on the invoices. For example, the UK requires VAT Reg No, Italy requires P.IVA, and Australia requires ABN.

To add the taxpayer identification number to the invoice template:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Invoice (or Settings → Printable Order).
2. Enter the taxpayer identification number into the field:
   

   

The changes will be autosaved.

Ecwid automatically detects your country and will set the appropriate tax ID name (VAT Reg No, ABN, etc.). If you need another name for your tax ID, click on the Edit name link and enter another display name.

Once added, your tax registration number will appear on all invoices in the header:

The taxpayer registration number will also be included in the footer of all email notifications sent to your customers. If you wish to adjust the placement of the taxpayer identification number in an email notification, you can edit the template for that notification.

Providing additional business details

You can add extra information about your company to the invoice header. This can be the information that is required in your country by law or any other details (e.g., bank account details or additional contacts).

To add information to the invoice header:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Invoice (or Settings → Printable Order).
2. Enter the information into the Business details field.

The changes will be autosaved. You can check the result on the preview.

Adding a footer message

You can also add a message to the invoice footer. This can be notes for customers or a special “Thank you” message.

To add information to the invoice footer:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Invoice (or Settings → Printable Order).
2. Enter the information into the Footer message field.

The changes will be autosaved, and the text will appear under the barcode in your invoice. You can check the result on the preview.

Editing the invoice template

Advanced users can edit the template of the invoice used in their store.

The invoice template in Ecwid contains:

• Variables to refer to the store or buyer information (invoice templates use the same collection of variables as our email notifications).
• Freemarker tags to replace variables with actual values and for their conditional rendering.
• CSS and HTML to define the structure and look of the invoice.

You can add standard HTML tags and special regular expressions to transfer order details to the invoice. You can include or remove the variables in these expressions, change their positions, or make a custom invoice that will precisely suit your needs.

To customize the invoice:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Invoice (or Settings → Printable Order).
2. Click Edit template.
3. Make the desired changes in the template.
4. Before saving any changes, click the Preview link on top to see how the invoice will look like.
5. If you don’t like the result, click the Revert to default link at the bottom of the template to restore the default invoice template.
   
   If you are making changes to a template that you previously customized and saved, the “Revert to default” option won’t work for you as it will revert to the original default template. To backup your template, copy the invoice template and save it as a text file on your computer. If something goes wrong, you can paste the code from the file back to the template.
6. When you are satisfied with the result, click Save.

Here are a few examples of small invoice customizations:

Example 1. Adding text to the invoice footer

If you want to add some message to the invoice, you can append it to the “Thank you for your order!” text. For example:

For this, open the invoice template for editing, scroll to its bottom and add your message as plain text after the variable ${textLabels.footerMessage} in the Invoice footer block:

You can also change the default footer message from "Thank you for your order!" to your own text by replacing the variable ${textLabels.footerMessage} with the desired wording in the template.

Example 2. Removing barcode from invoice

To remove the order barcode from your invoices, delete these lines from the bottom of your invoice template:

Translating invoices to other languages

A number of special variables are used to display general text labels in the invoice, like Order, Buyer, Thank you for your order!, etc. Here is the list of variables from the invoice template and the actual text that appears in place of these variables in invoices (English version):

Variable — Text label

${textLabels.order} — Order
${textLabels.orderComments} — Order comments
${textLabels.sku} — SKU
${textLabels.footerMessage} — Thank you for your order!
${textLabels.customerService} — Customer service
${textLabels.phone} — Phone
${textLabels.shippingMethod} — Shipping method
${textLabels.paymentMethod} — Payment method
${textLabels.discountCoupon} — Discount coupon
${textLabels.items} — Items
${textLabels.shipping} — Shipping
${textLabels.total} — Total
${textLabels.shipTo} — Ship to
${textLabels.buyer} — Buyer
${textLabels.pickupMethod} — Pickup Method
${textLabels.taxId} — Tax ID
${textLabels.taxFreeBusiness} — Tax Exempt Customer

These variables are automatically translated into your customer language if you offer your store in that language and if a translation of a text label exists in Ecwid. Otherwise, the label appears in English.

If Ecwid doesn’t yet have a translation of invoice labels into the language you need, you can replace the corresponding variables in the invoice template with your preferred text as a temporary solution. This text will appear on invoices for all customers regardless of their browser language.

For example, to add a translation of the “Thank you for your order!” message in the invoice, you can find the ${textLabels.footerMessage} variable in the invoice template and replace it with your translation:

The remaining content of your invoice is retrieved from the order details. You can translate your catalog into the desired languages, so that information about products appears in that language in the invoice, too.

FAQ

Can I use a third-party system to create invoices?

Yes. The Ecwid App Market offers several tools to help you customize invoices:

• PrintFantastic: Print Great Looking Invoices provides pre-made templates and customization options for invoices, packing slips, and shipping labels. You can batch print invoices, email them or download as a PDF.
• Printout Designer: Create Invoices, Packing Slips and Labels helps create great-looking invoices, sales receipts, gift receipts, and packing lists. While the layout of each print is static, you can edit captions and messages with different language defaults and remove unnecessary items from the templates.

Is there a way to shorten top margin?

You can easily change the margins in the print popup: start printing your invoice and select the minimal margin option from the printing settings, if you are satisfied with the preview, click Print. Here is an example of how these settings look like when printing in Google Chrome browser: