takeaway online pos with printer setup

[mugatea]

Hi,

I am the webmaster of a local indian that has opened. They want to do online orders and I'm looking into it so online orders get sent to the restaurant and printed out as soon as they are made. Rather than pay big commissions and a big one off setup fee to the many companies and marketplaces that offer this, I have found a place where you can buy a printer pos (or use your own and pay a one off fee to register it with them) and buy their woo-commerce app to connect your pos to your website through their cloud printing services at a cost of £7 plus vat. Is there anyway to send online orders to the POS myself somehow so there is no cost at all to the restaurant, except for the POS? The website is wordpress and Im planning on using woocommerce to set it up.

Jamie

 

[Graham Tyers]

We do this with woocommerce and a bit of code to post a form submission on receipt of order ( when an order changes to statusrocessing ) into a CGI in the office.
This then crafts a postscript file and pipes that to lpr for spooling to the printer and populates our order processing system. We can then just sit and do nothing and just wait for the printer to churn out the next order.

It all hinges on whether the POS they have is sufficiently open for you to post orders into it. If it's proprietary and locked down then there's possibly little point trying to reinvent the wheel - and accept that you're paying for the privilege of having no option other than to pay even more to get exactly what you want.

If it is possible to submit an order to it, you'll just need some sort of gateway into the restaurant - a raspberry pi or something and the rest would be pretty easy.

 

[mugatea]

We do this with woocommerce and a bit of code to post a form submission on receipt of order ( when an order changes to statusrocessing ) into a CGI in the office.
This then crafts a postscript file and pipes that to lpr for spooling to the printer and populates our order processing system. We can then just sit and do nothing and just wait for the printer to churn out the next order.

It all hinges on whether the POS they have is sufficiently open for you to post orders into it. If it's proprietary and locked down then there's possibly little point trying to reinvent the wheel - and accept that you're paying for the privilege of having no option other than to pay even more to get exactly what you want.

If it is possible to submit an order to it, you'll just need some sort of gateway into the restaurant - a raspberry pi or something and the rest would be pretty easy.

Thank you very much for replying. I am just an enthusiast rather than a pro and what you are doing in the office sounds a bit above my level, but I have found that Star makes thermal printers and offers a free woo commerce plugin compatible with several thermal printers that send orders from woo sales to the pos printer for free, or it seems to be that way, with just the cost of the pos itself, so I think thats the route we'll be taking.