Socks, in dozens of variants
Mes Chaussettes Rouges knits socks in Paris. Its storefront speaks English, shows prices in euros and carries a banner that promises worldwide shipping within 48 hours. The menu runs from knee-high to mid-calf, invisible and sports socks, then underwear, accessories, gift packs and a bestsellers shelf.
A catalogue built this way produces orders full of variants. Three pairs of the navy ribbed sock in one size, a houndstooth pair in another, a gift pack on top. Customers count the pairs in the parcel, so every line on the invoice has to match what went into the box. Wrong quantities generate emails.
What France wants on an invoice
An invoice in France is a legal document, and the list of mandatory content is long. It needs a unique sequential number and a date. The document names the seller with address, SIRET and VAT number, and the buyer too when the buyer is a company. Each line gives a quantity and a unit price, then come the VAT rate and the totals before and after tax. Clothing sits in the standard 20% band. Easy arithmetic. The work is in keeping every field in its place across thousands of documents.
Private customers can ask for an invoice and the seller has to supply one, while companies receive theirs automatically. A brand with both audiences needs a single template that handles each without a manual edit.
English documents, euro amounts
The shop installed Avada PDF Invoice in 2020 and works with the Blue Invoice template. Its documents come out in English, which matches the storefront. Two language settings are switched on in the account, multiple languages and invoices in the customer's own language, so a buyer who ordered in another tongue can get a document written to match.
Amounts follow the billing currency. VAT and tax fields are enabled, so the seller's tax details sit on the page, and the buyer's VAT ID joins them whenever an order carries one. SFTP and FTP export is on, so files are delivered to a server rather than downloaded one at a time. Email is the smaller channel here.
We built the invoice beside this article as a sample with the same template, and only the brand name is real. The address, the SIRET and VAT numbers, the customer, the products and the prices are all invented. It has four product lines, 109 euros before tax, a 5 euro shipping line, 22.80 euros of TVA at 20% and a total of 136.80 euros.
Six years, 140,000 documents
The app has sent more than 140,000 documents since 2020, almost all of them delivered as files to the shop's SFTP server rather than emailed. That is a long stretch for a catalogue where a few designs come back in dozens of size and colour combinations, and it all went through one template, one currency rule and one language setup. We hold no revenue or time-saving figure for the store, which leaves the document count as the one number worth printing.
Check your own invoice
Whatever you sell, the test is the same. Open a single invoice and read it the way a French customer or an accountant would, line by line. You can install Avada PDF Invoice, enter your SIRET and VAT number, pick a template and send yourself a test order.