Print On Demand - Multiple Unique Artwork Per Sales Order

I’m trying to understand if we can use ERPNext for our Print On Demand business. We power clients who sell t-shirts on their websites that can be customized by the shoppers with a picture. We stock the blank t-shirt and then print over it the artwork that our website clients send us. This can be thousands of different orders per day, each with a different design, going to different clients.

I was planning on writing a script to import this into ERPNext via the API. I’m having doubts about how to handle the artwork, though.

  • First approach I was thinking of was having an item that is ClientX-tshirt. Create a Sales Order for each order with this item and then attach as an extra field the artwork file to print to the sales order. The problem is that if there might be 3x of one design and 4x of a different one, and the sales order would only show 7x of ClientX-tshirt.

  • Second approach I was considering was having a ClientX-tshirt Item. Then on every data import create an item variant for each design that is imported. So an Item would be ClientX-tshirt-design123. This would potentially create hundreds of thousands of item variants, which is probably not great.

  • Third approach which by now is starting to seem the most reasonable is to create an Item Group for ClientX (that would include ClientX-tshirt, ClientX-packing materials, ClientX-label, and everything that is specific for this ClientX). Create a child Item Group called ClientX-tshirt. Underneath this ClientX-tshirt item group, on data import, create individual items for each design, so say, an Item would now be ClientX > ClientX-tshirt > design345. That Item “design345” would have an “artwork” file that would contain the file to print. Now each Sales Order can contain individual Items cleanly. This will end up creating 10,000’s or 100,000’s of Items in the database. Is this a problem? Is this last approach the best or should I consider a different one?

2 Likes

After giving it some more thought, it seems like the most logical solution for attaching custom artwork would be at the line-item level, so that the artwork is attached to the Sales Order. I have verified it’s possible to have the same item as different line item in one Sales Order, but how would I then attach artwork to each line item?

1 Like