How to Replace Etsy’s Gift Receipt with Your Own Custom Design Using Make.com

A step-by-step guide using Make.com, Google Docs and PrintNode

If you're an Etsy seller looking to elevate your brand and customer experience, you've likely run into a common limitation: Etsy's default gift receipts. They’re generic, carry Etsy’s own branding (and worse - appear to suggest Etsy made the ordered items), and don’t allow much room for personalisation or visual consistency.

But what if you could replace that standard gift receipt with your own custom-designed version—automatically, every time an order is placed?

In this guide, I’ll walk you through an automated Make.com scenario that we built at

Diddles and Puds, which:

• Detects new Etsy orders that are marked as gifts & include gift messages,

• Inserts the order details into a custom Google Docs template,

• And optionally prints it automatically to your home/business printer using PrintNode.

What You’ll Need Before You Start

Before jumping into the Make.com scenario, make sure you have the following in place:

Tool	Purpose
Make.com account*	To build the automation
Etsy seller account	To connect and retrieve orders
Google Docs template	Your custom gift receipt design
Google Drive connection	To create and store new documents
PrintNode account & desktop client	To send the document to your printer
(Optional) Canva / Google Docs	To design your template beautifully

*Free tier is usually enough for small shops (1000 operations per month), however if you wish to get a 1 month Pro trial on Make.com and 10,000 free operations, simply use any of our affiliated Make links in this article.

Overview of the Scenario

Here’s how the automation works, in plain English:

1. Trigger: When a new Etsy order comes in.

2. Check: Is it marked as a gift?

3. Extract: Pull details about the buyer, gift message, items, and variations.

4. Format: Insert those details into a custom Google Docs template.

5. (Optional) Print: Automatically print the finished document via PrintNode.

   
   

While this might seem daunting to alot of people, the great thing about Make is that it's a "no code" platform. Meaning no prior knowledge of coding (or any coding at all for that matter) is required.

Let’s walk through each step...

Step 1: Watch Etsy for New Orders

Module: Etsy – Watch Shop Receipts

This listens for new paid orders in your shop and triggers the scenario to start. Here you will need to add your Etsy connection (either Make's Etsy app or your own). You can also choose the number of orders you would like to fetch using the "Limit" field.

Step 2: Filter for Gift Orders

Filters orders where is_gift = true. This ensures the automation only runs when the customer has marked the order as a gift. This doesn't necessarily mean that the buyer has written a gift message, in which case we will use default values on our receipt.

Step 3: Extract Product Variations

This bit might look a little scary, and is certainly a bit more complex, but all it does is take variations like size, colour, personalisation and extract them.

These details are then formatted using a Text Aggregator to create a readable block like:

Size: Large, Colour: Blue, etc.

Step 4: Format the Product Details

Another Text Aggregator builds a block of formatted info for the template, including:

• Product title

• Quantity

• SKU

• Formatted variation details

• Short country code

This information is useful when fulfilling an order and identifying who placed it. We chose to add this information on the back of our gift receipt (in Google Docs) but you could print it on an entirely different page if preferred.

Step 5: Create a Google Docs Gift Receipt

One of my biggest priorities when making this scenario was to create something that was free to use and didn't rely heavily on third party services that charge for light use. Whilst Google Docs isn't the best software for designing; it is free and allows us to easily implement merge tags to create dynamic receipts.

For more information on setting up Google Docs and creating a template to be use in this step please see our guide here.

• A Google Docs template (stored in your Drive) is used here. Variables from the previous steps are then passed into the template

• sender_name → from Etsy gift sender field (or default "A special friend")

• message → from Etsy gift message (or default: “Enjoy your gift!”)

• product_details → the aggregated product info

• country → ISO country code

All done (or are we?)

And.. that's it! Once this step complete you should have a Google document saved to your Google Drive with the filename (Receipt ID - buyers name) that has all of the details imported from your Etsy order and saved .

At this stage you can print the file manually as you would do with any document. However, for an extra little bit of magic you can use PrintNode to print the file automatcially for you.

For this you will need to sign up to PrintNode (again a free account is available) and follow the instructions they provide to detect your printers. You will then need to generate an API key for Make to use. Again, PrintNode does a good job of explaining how to do this so follow their instructions and it should be generated instantly.

Once done you can now complete Step 6 below.

Step 6 (Optional): Print the Receipt Automatically

The document is automatically printed using the PDF export link returned when the Google Docs file was created. The printer settings in this module will depend on the printer selected and therefore will be different for most people but you can choose your preferred paper size, whether to print in colour or black and white, and whether to print double sided (if supported) in this module.

Start using the scenario yourself now.

Make allows scenarios to be turned into templates and shared with others. To use this scenario yourself, go to our Template link

There's also a helpful guided tour that will explain the important information needed for each step shown above. So get started and say goodbye to Etsy's horrible gift receipts for good!

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We hope you find this article useful. We've tried to cover all the bases, however, if you do find yourself struggling feel free to reach out via our contact form. You can also make a suggestions about how we can improve this guide in the comments below, or just share some love. Thank you either way!