Dressing up Your Invoices

January 12, 2007 | In Tricks |

Reading through merchant emails lately has allowed me to see some feature requests that I hadn’t heard of before. One request that I saw a few emails for was a means to add a company logo to order invoices or packing slips. Merchants were concerned about the “out of the box” experience (the process of unpacking the ordered item). While we don’t have this feature in the product currently, I did try a few different ways to accomplish this with minimal effort.

The Easy Way

The easiest way to add a company logo is to create your own company letterhead on which you print invoices or packing slips. You can put your logo as a watermark to appear at the top of your invoices.

example of packing slip with company logo

Invoices only have a half inch (0.5”) top margin so in the example above, I have placed the logo at the top right of the page. You can view an invoice in Acrobat Reader and copy the information to a Word document for determining the proper location for your logo. You may need to resize your logo to fit within the allotted space.

Another option would be to set the opacity of your logo to a value less than 50% and place it at the top center as a background image. The text for the invoice or packing slip will appear over the logo, but with the right logo, this can look professional; I would not recommend this approach for logos with a lot of text though.

Another option is to use the right margin and align your company name or logo vertically.

example with logo in sidebar

The example above shows a packing slip which has a larger available right margin (1.5”) in which to place your design. The invoice, which would likely be more commonly used, has a smaller available margin (0.7”) so your design would have to be more compact than the one shown above. Also, you may wish to use professional printing services with a design such as the example above. Printing a similar design in your office may not allow you to “bleed” the color to the edge of the paper as most office printers have a minimal margin, even if you set your word processor to have no margins.

Once you have the design you wish to use, you can have a print shop produce a large quantity. Before you spend the money to print large quantities though, make sure you test your design on both invoices and packing slips (if you send one or the other depending on if the order is a gift). Then just load your printer with your custom paper and print the invoice or packing slip as you process orders.

The Real Easy Way

Perhaps an even easier way, though it may not be right for all type of stores, is a customized rubber stamp. A quick search for “custom rubber stamps” showed multiple services that will help you create/design a custom rubber stamp for your store. You can even make it specific to packing such as “packed with care at Insert Store Name Here”. Then, you can simply print and stamp orders during the packing process.

The Not So Easy (But Not Quite So Hard) Way

One final way to add your logo to invoices or packing slips is by editing the files before printing them. You can download invoices or packing slips in PDF format and then run batch process action in Adobe Acrobat® for applying your logo as a background or watermark. Note this method requires you to have the full version of Acrobat, and not just Acrobat Reader®.

An alternate way is to download your invoices or packing slips in HTML file format (use the “options” button to switch the format from the default PDF format) and then insert your logo and print. If you have Macromedia Dreamweaver® you can set up a batch process by recording commands which you can repeat on multiple files. After editing the original files, you can then print the files.

The obvious downside to these last two methods (apart from needing to own additional software) is it will require some additional time to process orders. This may be fine for merchants with a low volume of orders, or at times of the year when orders are fewer, but this may present too much of a burden if orders pick up.

Remember though—in your quest to look like the ecommerce giants, don’t forget that as simple an act as writing thank you on your invoices, can make an even bigger impression on buyers.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

7 Comments »

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  1. I have a better idea maybe Yahoo should make it possible to add our company name & address to the standard invoice & packing slips instead of suggesting all sorts of workarounds.
    They make enough money from our businesses and it is clearly as per your article a request & need of their customers.

    Thank You
    Jacques Wurms

    Comment by JACQUES WURMS — January 13, 2007 #

  2. Jacques,

    It is certainly fair to say this is a request as I did see emails asking for this feature as indicated in my post. We do take note of features requested by our merchants and we use those requests as well as interviews with merchants, surveys, and other sources to determine what features are a priority.

    The whole point of this blog is to open the lines of communication with merchants, so we want to hear your feedback. We are in a much better place to make decisions with regards to the future of the platform, when our merchants tell us what they need and want.

    Thanks for the feedback,

    Paul

    Comment by Administrator — January 14, 2007 #

  3. I am a former Yahoo Store merchant (and hopefully a future Store merchant) and the method that Paul suggests is what I used and always found easy and customizable. If you look at how the invoices print you can then use any area on the page that will suit your needs. Because the printed area of my invoices rarely exceeded 3/4 of the page I:

    1. Made a word doc that had thanks and customer return information on the bottom. Because I controlled the layout it was easy to use the space for my purposes. With a little formatting, Word alone can make this look professional.

    2. Saved the file (I liked to mark it as Read-only)

    3. Printed out 500 or 1000 or however many I needed (usually on off white paper which doesn’t really cost much more). You could also go to a print shop but home/office printing is so easy and cheap you may not need to.

    For the rare cases where the invoice was to long I would just use a normal non pre-printed piece of paper or flip the invoice and print my footer on the back (folding the paper so “Enjoy your product!” always showed whether the footer was on the back or front).

    ———-
    Of course if this does not work for you, the order export csv files can just be imported into an Access database where you can create a fully customizable form.

    Comment by Zack Sheppard — January 16, 2007 #

  4. As an additional FYI here is an image of my footer.

    Comment by Zack Sheppard — January 16, 2007 #

  5. These method can not work for me since I e-mail a PDF copy to my warehouse directly from the Yahoo system.
    I do not have the time to cut and past.

    I think this is really something that that Yahoo should make available. For the money we pay them it this not to much to ask.

    Jacques

    Comment by JACQUES WURMS — February 7, 2007 #

  6. Hey All - We’ve had many clients that have gone with the pre-printing as well and it worked great. I do agree that the Yahoo Template should be editable, but in the mean time, many of our clients use the bottom 2 or 3 inches for their logo and contact info. In addition, the also flip the pages over and print a return form and instructions on the back of the page. They will print 500 or so at a time and then just print invoices over them as orders arrive.

    It won’t work for those that email the invoices, but if you are printing your own, it’s a great way to go.

    Matt
    Colorado Web Solutions
    http://www.ColoradoWebSolutions

    We Design Yahoo Businesses . . . Online

    Comment by Matt Sampson — April 4, 2007 #

  7. I am new to Yahoo stores - in fact I am in the process of launching my webstore. I have had a fairly high-end brick and morter for several years. I want to convey the high-end image to my online customers as we do to the ones that walk in the store.

    I too agree with Jaques that for the money we are all paying to have Yahoo host our stores that it isn’t too much to ask for for them to: 1) re-format the invoice/packing slip so that it doesn’t sit at the very top of the page - give us some room (2 inches?) to print it on our already existing letterhead or 2)make it so it is customizable. It seems that Yahoo would have the employees and the technical know-how to make either of these suggestions happen without too much difficulty, time or expense. Paul, who can make some changes happen?

    Thanks for your time,
    Laine Podell

    Comment by Laine Podell — July 31, 2007 #

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