Ask "can Shopify print a proper tax invoice?" and the honest answer is: not out of the box, and the reason is more structural than most merchants expect.

Without installing anything, Shopify's admin prints exactly two documents: a basic order summary, and a packing slip. That's what the help center says, in those words. Neither is an invoice, and neither is a receipt.

The packing slip is the interesting one. Its template is written in Liquid, which makes it look infinitely customizable. But the official Packing slip variable reference defines a closed set: three store variables, ten store-address variables, four order variables (order_number, name, note, created_at), four customer variables, thirteen address variables, and a line-item loop exposing title, variant title, SKU, vendor, quantity, shipping quantity, image, properties, and groups.

There is no price. No subtotal. No tax. No total. Not a single variable that renders money. The native packing slip is architecturally incapable of showing an amount.

That matters everywhere, but it matters most in the two regimes that require a tax breakdown on the document itself: EU and UK VAT, and Japan's qualified invoice system — a national e-invoicing regime that requires a per-rate tax breakdown and a registered issuer number on the face of the document. Below: what the native templates actually contain, what the free first-party app adds and doesn't, and seven real invoicing apps compared on identical axes. Researched September 1, 2026. All prices are USD as listed on the Shopify App Store.

The short version

No app, no tax invoice. The native packing slip has no money variables, and the order-page print is an internal summary. This is determined by the platform, not by a setting you haven't found yet.

"Just install Shopify Order Printer" is also wrong, though closer. The free first-party app ships three default templates — Invoice, Packing slip, Pick list. Shopify publishes the default template code in full, and the invoice's tax row is a single line: {{ order.tax_price | money }}. One number, all rates combined. No rate breakdown, no registration number, no reduced-rate indicator. The accurate statement is: you can make it compliant by rewriting the template in HTML, CSS, and Liquid.

By scenario:

• You have someone who writes Liquid, and you want zero cost → Shopify Order Printer (free). order.tax_lines and line_item.tax_lines are both exposed, so a per-rate breakdown is implementable
• You don't write Liquid but want to keep the free printer → Order Printer Templates (one-time $29, then $14 per extra template)
• Low order volume, but you need auto-emailed PDFs → Order Printer Pro: PDF Invoice or AG Order Printer ‑ PDF Invoice (both free up to 50 orders/month)
• You want customers to self-serve their own PDFs → Vify Order Printer PDF Invoice (frontend PDF download is on the free plan)
• Audit trail matters more than price → Sufio: Invoices You Can Trust (issues a separate credit note instead of overwriting the original invoice)
• You're in Japan and want the regime handled in settings, in Japanese → Mixlogue Quick Order Printer ($9/mo), the only listing here that mentions Japan's regime at all

What the native templates actually contain

Two documents, and one of them can't show money

Shopify's Printing orders help page is explicit about the app-free surface: print a basic order summary from the admin, and print packing slips individually or in bulk. For anything more, it directs you to the Shopify Order Printer app.

So the packing slip is the only customer-facing document Shopify hands you for free — and it's the one that can't display a price. You edit it under Settings → Shipping and delivery → Documents → Packing slip template, and it's a different, far narrower Liquid surface than the Order Printer templates. Merchants routinely conflate the two and then spend an afternoon looking for a variable that was never defined.

The default invoice template, in full

Shopify publishes the restore-to-default code for both built-in templates. Here is the totals block of the Invoice template (version dated June 6, 2024):

<tr>
  <td scope="row" colspan="2" style="text-align: right;">Subtotal</td>
  <td style="text-align: right;">{{ order.line_items_subtotal_price | money }}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td scope="row" colspan="2" style="text-align: right;">Tax</td>
  <td style="text-align: right;">{{ order.tax_price | money }}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td scope="row" colspan="2" style="text-align: right;"><strong>Total</strong></td>
  <td style="text-align: right;"><strong>{{ order.total_price | money }}</strong></td>
</tr>

One tax row. If an order mixes a standard rate and a reduced rate, both land in that single figure. The heading is the literal word Invoice, the "bill to" block is the billing address, and there is no field anywhere for a VAT number or any other issuer registration identifier.

For a UK or EU merchant this fails a VAT invoice on the rate-breakdown requirement. For a Japanese merchant it fails the qualified-invoice requirements on both the per-rate breakdown and the registration number. Same template, same gap, two jurisdictions.

The data is there; the default template just doesn't use it

This is the part worth knowing before you go shopping. The Order Printer Liquid reference confirms the TaxLine object exposes price, rate, rate_percentage, and title, reachable from both order.tax_lines and line_item.tax_lines. Shopify's own customization guide includes a worked example that loops line_item.tax_lines and prints tax amount and title per line.

So a per-rate breakdown is a template problem, not a data problem. The constraint is implementation cost — the help center states plainly that creating or editing these templates requires familiarity with HTML, CSS, and Liquid, and recommends hiring a Shopify Partner for anything complex. You can create up to 15 templates.

Where the issuer number lives (nowhere obvious)

Storing a registration number in Shopify and referencing it from the template is the natural design. It doesn't have a natural home.

Shopify's Japan tax guide states that merchants "aren't required to enter tax registration numbers to charge tax" to customers, and that Japan runs on location-based tax with manually set rates. Meanwhile the Order Printer Liquid reference lists metafield-capable objects as Order, Customer, Product, Variant, and Location — Shop is not among them. (The same page's Shop attribute list does include metafields, so Shopify's own documentation is internally inconsistent here.)

In practice you either hardcode the string into each template, or you put it in an app's settings field. The first approach scatters the same literal across templates and creates a quiet failure mode when the number changes.

Shopify Tax doesn't cover it either

Shopify Tax — automated rate calculation, and VAT invoice generation for EU/UK — is scoped to the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, and Canada. Japan is not in scope and runs on manual, location-based rates, with tax-inclusive pricing required and tax back-calculated as Tax = (Tax Rate X Price) / (1 + Tax Rate).

What Shopify Order Printer's rating tells you

The free first-party app rates 3.6 from 359 reviews. The distribution is unusual: 34% five-star (122), and 45% one-star (162). That's not a mediocre app — it's a polarized one.

The 2025–26 one-star reviews cluster on capability, not stability. No order search inside the app (March 2026). Legacy templates that still won't import two years on (January 2026). "I have to know code to customize this?" (February 2026). Packing slips printing out of order, matched to the wrong shipping labels (March 2025). No print option on iPad or phone (March 2025). A June 2026 review reports that accented characters render correctly in preview but turn to gibberish when iOS hands the page to the printer — worth knowing before you commit to a non-Latin document set.

The most on-topic complaint is from November 2025: a UK merchant notes that a VAT invoice should be emailed automatically at the time of payment, that this doesn't happen, and that Flow offers no path to generate an invoice and email the PDF. That tracks the listing, which claims print and export but says nothing about PDF generation or email automation.

Seven invoicing apps compared

All figures reflect the Shopify App Store as of September 1, 2026.

	Shopify Order Printer	Mixlogue Quick Order Printer	Order Printer Pro: PDF Invoice	Vify Order Printer PDF Invoice	Sufio: Invoices You Can Trust	AG Order Printer ‑ PDF Invoice	Order Printer Templates
Developer (country)	Shopify (CA)	mixlogue, Inc. (JP)	Order Printer (GB)	Vify Order Printer (VN)	Sufio (SK)	Avada (VN)	Order Printer (GB)
Built for Shopify	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Free plan	Fully free	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Free to install
What "free" means	No stated cap	—	50 orders/month	Latest 50 orders	—	50 orders/month	Customize and test only
Paid entry point	—	$9/mo	$10/mo	$10.99/mo	$7/mo	$15/mo	$29 one-time
What drives the bill	—	Flat	Monthly order count	Feature tier	Invoices issued/month	Feature tier	Templates purchased
Free trial	—	7 days	14 days	14 days	14 days	7 days	—
Per-rate tax breakdown without coding	No — template rewrite	Listing claims regime support	Not stated	Not stated	Not stated	Not stated	Not stated
Issuer / VAT number output	Hardcode in template	Settings field in app	Template custom field	Not stated	Not stated	Not stated	Custom field (VAT info cited)
Customer self-download	Not listed	Yes (thank-you page, email, account)	Yes (customer accounts)	Yes, on free plan	Yes (from online store)	Yes (customer accounts)	No
Sequential numbering	Invoice numbers only	Invoice numbers only	Yes	Yes	Yes (custom numbering at $49/mo)	Yes	Not listed
Bulk output	Yes (up to 50)	Yes	Yes	Paid plans	Yes	Yes	Via host app
Auto-email PDF	Not listed	Not listed	Yes	Paid plans	Yes	Yes	No
Languages field	English only	English, Japanese	31 incl. Japanese	9 incl. Japanese	English, German, French	9 incl. Japanese	20 incl. Japanese
Local-language support	Not confirmed	Yes (Japanese)	Not confirmed	Not confirmed	Not confirmed	Not confirmed	Not confirmed
Rating / reviews	3.6 / 359	5.0 / 8	4.9 / 2,743	4.9 / 1,145	4.9 / 428	4.9 / 693	4.9 / 680

What the table actually tells you

"E-invoicing support" means Europe, almost every time. Four of the seven listings advertise Peppol, ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, or XRechnung. Exactly one — Mixlogue — mentions Japan's regime. Sufio's tax feature tags name EU VAT, Indian GST, Canada, and US sales tax; Japan appears nowhere despite the "compliant in 50+ countries" claim. Regimes that sound similar are not interchangeable: what a UK VAT invoice needs and what a Japanese qualified invoice needs overlap on rate breakdown and diverge on the issuer identifier. Treat "not stated" as "verify it yourself in the trial," not as "unsupported."

Three different definitions of "free." Shopify Order Printer is free with no stated cap. Order Printer Pro and AG Order Printer give you 50 orders per month. Vify gives you the latest 50 orders, which is a different thing entirely — reissuing an old document later behaves differently under that model. Sufio has no free plan and meters documents, not orders: at $7/mo you get 15 invoices, so a store doing 50 orders a month starts at $19/mo, not $7.

Billing drivers don't line up, so monthly minimums don't compare. Order Printer Pro steps at 50/500/5,000 orders. Sufio meters documents issued. Vify and AG Order Printer gate by feature tier. Mixlogue is flat. A high-volume store with minimal formatting needs reads cheapest on Mixlogue's flat $9; a low-volume store that needs automation gets the most from Order Printer Pro's free tier.

Built for Shopify says nothing about regulatory fit. All four badged apps are silent on Japan's regime; the one app that addresses it has no badge. The badge measures performance, design, and integration quality — not statutory content.

Only one vendor states what happens to your documents after uninstall. Mixlogue's listing says all data is written to Shopify's own servers and none is retained on third-party infrastructure. The other six publish nothing on the question. Since issued invoices are records you're expected to retain, reissuing them after switching apps belongs in your selection criteria — ask before you migrate, not after. On negative reviews, only two apps have enough recent signal to read: Shopify Order Printer, where one-star reviews are 45% of the total, and Sufio, where a July 2026 review flags the duty line-item limitation. The other five sit at roughly 1% one-star, which is too thin to generalize from.

UI language and support language are separate columns for a reason. Five listings show Japanese in the Languages field. Exactly one has a Japanese-domiciled developer and confirmable Japanese support. Sufio has neither.

App notes

Shopify Order Printer

Shipped by Shopify in May 2024, free, with Invoice, Packing slip, and Pick list templates fully editable in HTML, CSS, and Liquid. Prints up to 50 orders in bulk without entering the app. Both order.tax_lines and line_item.tax_lines are available, so the raw material for a compliant document is there.

Three constraints: English-only admin, a default invoice template shaped for nothing in particular, and no listed PDF generation or email automation. POS receipt customization is explicitly unsupported. Right for teams that write Liquid and stop at print-and-export.

One naming trap: the older order-printer handle now returns "This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store." If a tutorial sends you there, you're reading about the predecessor.

Mixlogue Quick Order Printer

Built in Tokyo by mixlogue, Inc., live since July 2020. Outputs receipts (with or without line detail), delivery notes (with or without amounts), invoices, and quotes, and supports uploading a company seal image. Also exports shipping-label CSVs for the three major Japanese carriers.

It's the only listing in this set whose body text claims support for Japan's qualified invoice regime, and Shopify's own Japanese blog documents the flow: tick "issue a regime-compliant invoice" in the template settings, then enter your registration number and annotation. That makes it the only candidate here with a settings field for the issuer number rather than a hardcoded string.

The caveat is sample size: eight reviews, all five-star. A March 2023 review asks why receipts show a flat standard rate for a merchant selling food at the reduced rate; the vendor replied by pointing to Shopify's tax-setup documentation. The listing says reduced-rate handling is among the features being added on an ongoing basis, but how much of the per-rate split is automatic today could not be confirmed from public sources. $9/mo flat, no free plan, 7-day trial — test it with a mixed-rate order.

Order Printer Pro: PDF Invoice

Live since 2014 and the largest review base here (4.9 / 2,743). Free to install up to 50 orders/month, then $10/mo (51–500), $20/mo (501–5,000), $40/mo (5,001+), with a 14-day trial on paid tiers. Billing depends on order count alone, which makes it the easiest to forecast.

The feature surface is the broadest in this set: email automation, PDF generation, bulk download, sequential numbering, tax calculation, multi-currency, multi-language, plus Checkout, POS, and customer account extensions. Peppol e-invoicing is offered as an in-app add-on. 31 languages including Japanese, and it appears in Shopify's "Shipping in Japan" guide — which is a distribution signal, not a compliance claim. Nothing on the listing addresses Japan's document requirements. Developer address is London; support is English.

Vify Order Printer PDF Invoice

Hanoi-based, live since 2021, 4.9 from 1,145 reviews. Its distinguishing move is putting frontend PDF download on the free plan, so you can measure whether self-serve documents actually reduce your support tickets before paying anything.

The free cap is the latest 50 orders, not 50 per month. Bulk processing, branding removal, unlimited orders, automated email delivery, and custom invoice numbering all start at Starter ($10.99/mo); extra templates and a custom sender address at Premium ($29.99/mo). Annual billing saves 17%. Works with Flow, POS, Checkout, and customer accounts. Advertises Peppol, ZUGFeRD, and Factur-X; silent on Japan.

Sufio: Invoices You Can Trust

Bratislava, live since 2013. The design philosophy is the differentiator: where most apps overwrite the original invoice when an order is refunded or edited, Sufio issues a separate invoice and a separate credit note, so the document history stays intact. If your auditor cares about that, it's a real distinction.

Metered on documents: Starter $7/mo (15 invoices), Growth $19/mo (50), Professional $49/mo (5,000), Premium $129/mo (unlimited). No free plan; 14-day trial. Custom document numbering starts at Professional.

Three languages — English, German, French. The tax feature tags cover EU VAT, India GST, Canada, and US sales tax. A July 2026 review from a long-term customer flags that prepaid export duties can't be shown as a separate invoice line despite being included in the total; the vendor supplied an unsupported workaround.

AG Order Printer ‑ PDF Invoice

Formerly marketed as Avada PDF Invoice; the current listing name is AG Order Printer ‑ PDF Invoice, though the URL handle is still avada-pdf-invoice. 4.9 from 693 reviews.

Free up to 50 orders/month including automation emails. Pro ($15/mo) unlocks unlimited bulk printing and POS; Ultimate ($39/mo) adds template customization and multi-currency/multi-language; Wholesale ($49/mo) adds B2B company management, net terms, and balance tracking. The trial is 7 days rather than the 14 that's typical here. B2B depth is what sets it apart.

It also requests the widest permission set in this group — order editing, store credit, and theme read access among them. E-invoicing claims are PEPPOL BIS 3.0, ZUGFeRD, Factur-X, and XRechnung.

Order Printer Templates

Different category of thing. It doesn't issue documents; it builds templates for Shopify Order Printer and Order Printer Pro without code. Pricing is one-time rather than recurring: $29 for your first template, $14 for each additional, with customization and testing free.

This is the answer to "I want the free printer but nobody here writes Liquid." The listing cites custom elements including VAT information, and the feature tags include tax calculation and custom fields — but how far the no-code editor gets you toward a specific jurisdiction's required fields could not be confirmed from public information. No auto-email, no customer self-download.

Before you install

• Decide what the document must contain before you decide what it's called. Requirements are about fields, not titles
• Do you sell at more than one tax rate? If yes, per-rate breakdown is your primary evaluation criterion, and most listings don't address it
• Where will the issuer registration number live? If the answer is "hardcoded," count how many templates you'd have to edit when it changes
• Do customers need to fetch their own PDFs? That eliminates Order Printer Templates and the bare Shopify Order Printer
• Do you need the PDF auto-attached to an email? Shopify Order Printer doesn't list that capability
• Estimate order count and document count separately — Sufio bills on one, Order Printer Pro on the other
• Separate "the admin is in my language" from "support answers in my language." They are not the same column
• Can you finish testing inside the trial? Mixlogue and AG Order Printer give you 7 days
• Do you have a plan to run a real mixed-rate test order and inspect the rendered PDF before this touches production?

Bottom line

Three decisions, in order.

First, stop looking for the native setting. App-free printing is an order summary and a packing slip, and the packing slip's variable reference defines no money variables at all. This isn't hidden; it's absent.

Second, price the template work. Shopify Order Printer is free and exposes tax_lines at both order and line-item level, so the compliant document is buildable. But the default template collapses tax into one row, the admin is English-only, and there's no auto-email. Whether you have someone who writes Liquid is the actual fork in the road — and if you don't, Order Printer Templates at $29 one-time is cheaper than a subscription.

Third, decide where jurisdiction-specific content comes from. If you need EU/UK VAT invoices, Sufio, Order Printer Pro, Vify, and AG Order Printer all publish e-invoicing standards support. If you need Japan's qualified invoice, exactly one listing here addresses it — Mixlogue Quick Order Printer at $9/mo — and its eight-review base means you verify it yourself in the 7-day trial rather than taking the listing's word for it.

Pricing, ratings, and language support all move. Every figure here reflects the Shopify App Store, Shopify Help Center, and Japan's National Tax Agency publications as of September 1, 2026. This is a summary of what those sources state, not tax advice — confirm requirements with a qualified professional in your jurisdiction.