Printer works fine, no ShipStation error, yet labels are not printing

Validation incoming.

This has happened to us countless times over the past few weeks. The first time, I immediately got into a chat with a human on the SS team and they remoted into our computer because we confirmed everything was connected properly after refreshing, rebooting, etc. Ultimately, they found (or disclosed) no real cause for the issue. It was near the end of our work day, so I made a note for what orders needed labels printed for the following morning, hoping everything worked by then. It did! No resolution ticket, but I was glad it worked again. It has happened sporadically since that day, but for no longer than an hour. It's not convenient to halt shipping in the middle of a work day because a shipping software isn't able to print shipping labels. 

If anyone on the support team has a WO for troubleshooting this (besides refreshing connections and making sure all printers are connected), please share it here. Any insights as to what is causing this problem is helpful too. If there are system updates in SS internally that are causing interferences with basic SS consumer functionality, we'd just like to know about it.

Hello @rarelyjeremy!

Thank you for your post on the community! I see that you currently have a ticket open with the support team and have scheduled a time for a screen share. While I wish I could provide more information, the best way to troubleshoot this issue is to work directly with the support team.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns!

-Cara

This has been a consistent issue on all 3 of our workstations over the past few months, support has constantly gave us the same troubleshooting steps with no results. It seems to happen during the later half of the day

I have had this issue as well. I found that if shipstation is not running in the background you will not get labels to print.  I found that if you close shipstation and restart shipstation, this has worked for me, hope this helps.

I had this happen to me again. I noticed that I had two stations that were both connected under the same name. I disconnected one of them and my labels started working again. My guess is that ship station did not know which station to use. Hope this helps.

We have a similar issue. Unfortunately it appears to have started happening after the ShipStation Connect software was updated on our Windows machine. When printing from the App we get the Successfully Started Print Job message but nothing ever prints out. ShipStation customer support, as usual, has been absolutely useless.

is your account set for ZPL or PDF labels?

Sales142:

We have the exact same problem. Shipstation has been unable to fix.

Hello, @sales142!

Thank you for your post in the community! I looked into your issue, and it seems that support informed you of a fix that was implemented on 9/10/24. If you're still experiencing any problems, don't hesitate to reach out to support@shipstation.com. 

Happy Shipping!

-Cara

The 9/10/2024 fix worked for us. We are once again able to print labels to the remote thermal printers.

What's amusing is we just recently purchased an inexpensive BlueTooth enabled thermal label printer from Amazon. This allowed employees to print directly from a tablet running ShipStation to the thermal printer WITHOUT needing to use ShipStation Connect. If ShipStation should have a problem with their Connect software again we're now setup to print remotely without having to wait for another fix.

Hello, this has happened to me again. I noticed that I had two work stations when I checked in settings. So I closed out of ship station complete and restarted ship station. It still showed the two work stations. I deactivated the one station and the labels started working again. I also noticed that the work station I deactivated did not have any of my printers marked as shared. I hope this helps and  I also am going to look into this fix that they say is available.

Hello @PR73_2!

Thank you so much for posting in the community! If this fix doesn’t fully resolve the issue, no worries! Feel free to contact our fantastic support team; they’ll be happy to help you with some troubleshooting steps. We’re here for you every step of the way!"

Happy Shipping!

-Cara

And one of you guys Ryan from User Success Specialist was telling us they could not investigate this issue since it is not happening anymore, Shipstation are you being serious? We have an entire thread, live, here. What are we going to do about issues with such unstable Shipstation Connect and the failure with your software update that pretty much downgrades your system instead of upgrading? Being able to print labels is so important, is this so hard to understand? Please explain to us the steps you are going to take going forward!

Hi there, hoping someone has been able to get an answer to what looks like a continual issue:

I’m unable to print from ShipStation. I can print test documents from MacOS Finder directly to the printer, so I know it’s connected and working. 

In addition: 

ShipStation Connect is connected ✅
My Demo LabelWriter 5XL printer is connected ✅
It shows up in MacOS as well as ShipStation > Printing > Connect > Devices > Printers ✅

So, ShipStation recognizes the printer just fine. 

HOWEVER — when I send ANY ShipStation order to this printer, ShipStation thinks that it successfully sends the data, however my printer does nothing.

There is no error message. 

I can get around this by downloading as a PDF and then printing straight to the printer however this is not ideal.

Thank you in advance, 

Hello @Custard!

Thank you for your post in the community! I see you’ve already reached out to support on ticket #7671157, which is absolutely the right step. The support team will be the best resource to guide you through the troubleshooting process. We appreciate your effort and patience as they work to assist you!

Happy Shipping! 

-Cara