Skip to content

Item Signs

Item signs are printable 7-inch × 5-inch display signs for your sales floor. Each sign shows the item's photo, name, price, and any plant attributes you've flagged for signs (light, bloom, height, and so on). Signs print two per portrait letter (8.5" × 11") page on your regular office printer — cut the page in half and slip each sign into a sign holder.

Signs are generated from a single item's page, and a sign queue lets you build up a batch from several items and print them all at once.

  1. Open the item in Inventory (use Inventory → Search to find it).
  2. Click the ⚡ Actions dropdown at the top right of the item page and choose Print Sign. The sign opens print-ready in a new browser tab.
  3. Print the tab with your browser's print command (Cmd+P on Mac, Ctrl+P on Windows).

On screen, a thin border shows the edge of each printed page; it doesn't print. Signs are laid out two per page, so a single sign prints on the top half of the sheet.

The sign page keeps a queue so you can collect signs from multiple items and print them together, two per page:

  1. Open the first item, click ⚡ Actions → Print Sign.
  2. On the sign page, click + Queue. You'll see a "Queued!" confirmation and be returned to the item page.
  3. Repeat for each additional item. Every time you open Print Sign, the page shows all queued signs plus the current item's sign.
  4. When the last item's sign page shows everything you want, print it with your browser's print command.
  5. Click Clear Queue to empty the queue when you're done (it also returns you to the previous page).

The queue is tied to your browser session on that computer — it isn't shared with other users, and clearing it only affects you.

What prints on an item sign

The standard sign layout contains:

  • Photo — fills the left half of the sign. See the section below on sign photos for where the image comes from.
  • QR code — printed in the photo corner if your store's website is set up with item pages; scanning it takes the customer to that item on your site. (No QR code prints if item web pages aren't configured for your store.)
  • Name — the item's Description, in large type. If the item has an Ext. Description (in the Details section of the item page), it prints underneath in italics.
  • Price — the item's unit price, in very large type (or Priced as Marked — see below).
  • Attributes — one row per attribute that has Sign set to Yes, in your attribute sort order (see the next section).
  • Company name — your store name, small, at the bottom of the sign.

The price on the sign is the item's price at the moment you print — reprint signs after price changes.

Choose which attributes print on signs

Attributes (light requirement, bloom color, mature size, hardiness zone, etc.) print on signs only when the attribute type is flagged for signs:

  1. Go to Inventory → Attributes, then click Edit Attribute Types.
  2. For each attribute type, set the Sign column to Yes to print it on signs, or No to leave it off.
  3. The Sort value controls the order attributes appear on the sign.

The values themselves come from each item's Attributes tab — an attribute row only prints when the item actually has a value for it.

To fit the sign, some long attribute names are shortened automatically on the printed sign: "Light Requirement" prints as Light, "Bloom Color" prints as Bloom, and "Season of Interest" prints as Season (and if all four seasons are selected, it prints Season: All).

Which photo prints on the sign

The sign looks for an image in this order:

  1. An attachment with type Item Sign — use this when you want the sign to show a different (usually higher-quality or more dramatic) photo than the one on your website.
  2. The item's regular Item Image (the photo used online).

For each of those, if the item doesn't have its own image, the sign borrows one from another size of the same plant — another item with the same department, name, variety, and color. (So a sign photo on a sibling size is used before the item's own web photo. A few stores have asked VMX to turn this borrowing off.)

To give an item a dedicated sign photo:

  1. On the item page, open the Attachments tab and click + Attachment to upload the image.
  2. After it uploads, click the edit icon next to the attachment to open its page.
  3. Set the Type dropdown to Item Sign and save.

For items where each unit carries its own price tag (mixed-size nursery stock, for example), the sign can say Priced as Marked instead of showing a single price:

  1. On the item page, find the Tags field (in the Details section — this is the free-form tag cloud, not price tags).
  2. Add the tag asmarked and save the item.

A sign printed for that item shows Priced as Marked in place of the price, and titles the sign with the item's Name, Variety, and Color rather than the full description (so one sign can cover several sizes of the same plant).

Design your own sign templates

You can replace the standard sign with layouts of your own, using sign templates. A template is an HTML design — usually made by your designer — and VMX fills it with each item's name, price, image, and attributes at print time. Once any template exists, Print Sign uses your templates instead of the standard layout; the printing steps and the queue work the same way.

Creating a template

Go to Inventory → Sign Templates and click + Sign Template.

  • Name — how it appears in lists and (if you have several) the template chooser.
  • Source "VMX" — paste the template HTML right into VMX. No web hosting needed. This is the usual choice.
  • Source "External URL" — VMX fetches the template from a web address on every print. Use this if your designer prefers publishing to their own site.

Hand your designer the template documentation link on the Sign Templates page — it documents exactly what data VMX provides to the template and includes working examples. Use Preview on any template to see it rendered with sample data before mapping it to real items.

Let VMXpert design a template for you

Sign design by VMXpert is enabled per-client by VMX — contact help@vmxllc.com if you'd like it turned on for your store.

Once it's on, you don't need a designer to get a custom sign: ask VMXpert (the leaf icon in the top bar). Tell it what you want — "design us a bench-card sign for the perennials" — and it drafts a template using your store's own attributes, photos, and brand color, then sends you a preview link showing the design on your real items. Reply with what to change ("bigger price", "add deer resistance") and it revises the draft.

Drafts never affect what staff print. When you like the design, VMXpert asks for your approval — an Approve card in the chat — before making the template live and mapping it to your items. VMXpert can also write short per-item sign blurbs (a sentence or two of selling copy that prints on the sign); those go through the same review-and-confirm step as any other inventory change.

Mapping templates to items

Each template's Mappings page controls which items use it. A mapping can target a single PLU, a collection, a sub-department, a department, or be the default. When an item is printed, the most specific mapping wins:

PLU → Collection → Sub-department → Department → Default

If an item matches two templates at the same level (for example, it's in two mapped collections), the person printing chooses from a short list, and their last choice is pre-selected next time.

Templates receive only attributes flagged for signs — the same Sign setting described in "Choose which attributes print on signs" above.

Custom sign layouts

Some stores have older custom sign layouts built directly into VMX — different sizes or orientations, store branding and logos, care icons. If your signs look different from everything described here, your store has one of these; the printing steps (⚡ Actions → Print Sign and printing from the browser) work the same way, and most custom layouts keep the + Queue / Clear Queue buttons too. To change one of these designs — or to move it onto self-serve sign templates so you can edit it yourself — contact help@vmxllc.com.