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How can I configure a restaurant's POS printer to print orders from a web site? We have an online ordering web application, based on .NET/SQL. Once the order is submitted online, we want to print it on the POS printer in the restaurant.

POS Printer - Epson TM-88V, or equivalent Printer is connected to internet directly(or through a router), but NOT through a PC!

The online ordering system is Clorder (http://www.clorder.com)

Any guidance is greatly appreciated.

user1457386
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    I attempted to check their site out, I would recommend staying away from them. Almost none of the links work, they take you back to the same marketing page (product.aspx). They have no technical reference (but there may be one if you get in to the members area) on how you get the orders on the SMB side. Also according to their Blog section this company only started existing the middle of last month. I would recommend going with someone who has been around a bit longer. – Scott Chamberlain Jun 15 '12 at 01:18
  • Scott..I am one of the two members who started Clorder as a startup. We have both end user app as well as a business owner application with a ton of features. 9 restaurants are currently using it with no issues, and we have 4 in pipeline. Currently, the order confirmation is sent as email/fax/txt message/voice call, depending on the need. Some of our customers preferred printing on a POS, but the POS folks are charging anywhere between $12K to $20K to integrate for something as simple as printing an order from a website! The clorder website is still incomplete, although our application is not! – user1457386 Jun 15 '12 at 02:34

1 Answers1

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You will need to configure something inside your network that will retrieve the orders from your website, and then that will print to your printer.

Paul Farry
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  • Thanks for your reply. So, i guess what you are saying is that i need to configure the router in the restaurant such that it can retrieve the orders from the website!!! Or did you mean the POS Printer can be configured to retrieve orders from the website? – user1457386 Jun 15 '12 at 01:01
  • I was thinking of the following workflow. (1) Orders confirmed on Clorder's(http://www.clorder.com) restaurant app --> (2) Order receipt sent to the POS Printer --> (3) Order gets printed on the POS Printer. For the step (2), we can send the order details in what ever format the printer can accept. The question is how can we set the POS Printer to a wait state, and print when the website pushes a print job to it? – user1457386 Jun 15 '12 at 01:02
  • The workflow Paul was describing was (1) Orders confirmed on Clorder's(clorder.com) restaurant app --> (2) A application running on a computer inside the network that can talk to both the printer and the website back end downloads the order from the website (3) Order gets printed on the POS Printer by the program in step 2. – Scott Chamberlain Jun 15 '12 at 01:09
  • Scott...Thanks for the clarification. In our situation we don't have a computer inside the network to talk to both the printer and website! That is the key challenge we are trying to tackle. Apparently it is possible with Epson's TM-88V, and a few others have done it somehow. When i called Epson tech support team, they asked to download the .net wrapper and driver from their website, but don't seem to know how to configure the printer as a listening device on network! – user1457386 Jun 15 '12 at 01:29
  • I would definately decouple the website from a printer directly. It maybe possible to do with that printer, but what if a different customer has a different printer?? you need to change the site for 1 customer... Make your app have `IPrinter` interfaces, then you can retrieve the orders from the site and print to the specific printer. – Paul Farry Jun 15 '12 at 04:47
  • I wonder how did you solve this problem? Am stuck in a similar situation that I needs to print to the Receipt Printer. – Coder Absolute Feb 09 '17 at 04:11
  • @CoderAbsolute you may want to address your Question to the OP or ask a new One. This question is old now and I no longer work in the POS industry – Paul Farry Feb 15 '17 at 02:54