Our order taking app can be connected to multiple Epson and Star thermal printers.
Thermal printers are widely used in restaurants. They are robust, fast, require no toner change and paper costs are close to nothing. Epson and Star are leading manufacturers in this segment.
The app supports three types of printer connection:
To add a printer, open the order taking app and select Thermal printer from the menu. The app will guide you through adding a LAN, WiFi or Bluetooth printer.
In case you have multiple working stations, you can add several printers and have your orders printed on all of them. The iOS version of the Order Taking App supports adding multiple printers with different connectivity types (like shown in the image below). On Android, all your printers must have the same connectivity type (all LAN/WiFI or all Bluetooth).
Furthermore, you can go in the Admin Panel and decide exactly what to be printed on each printer: which template, number of copies and language. For text-only printers you will be limited to the text-only receipt template. But for printers that support image printing, you can create custom restaurant receipts and assign them as needed per printers.
To benefit from Custom Printing, you need:
In the Admin you can find 2 restaurant receipt templates that we’ve prepared for you, suggestively called Client receipt and Kitchen essentials.
The Client receipt template contains:
The Kitchen essentials template contains:
Note: You need a printer with image printing capabilities in order to use these templates. If your printer can only print text, you can still get the order printed, but in a default plain-text template.
To customize your receipts, start from one of these templates and use the restaurant receipt generator to make adjustments as you see fit. You can:
The best part is that while you make all these changes you can see a real time preview of how your restaurant receipt looks like.
You can even generate previews for different real life situation by playing with the order type (delivery, pickup, order ahead), payment method (cash, card online etc) or fulfillment time (asap or later). That’s how you make sure that everything looks exactly how you need without having to print tones of test orders.
Note: If your printer can only print text (not also images), the receipt comes out in a plain-text format that you cannot customize.
We’ve looked at the most popular printers used by our clients and picked the ones that perform best. All the printers below are reliable, easy to install and support image printing. Moreover, we have them in our office for testing and are the first ones we debug in case of issues. So if you want to buy a thermal printer to connect to the order taking app, we highly recommend one from this list.
If you're looking to buy compatible GloriaFood printer models, delivered worldwide and at quite good prices (including good shipping fees), then you can take a look at the GloriaFood collection exhibited on shopposportals.com.
When buying a printer from any other sources, pay close attention to its characteristics, as the name alone can be deceiving. There are several models under the same name, and usually they differ only by color and interface (how they are able to connect).
For example, EPSON TM-T20II is a series with 2 models. You need to buy the one with Ethernet, if you wish to connect it to the order taking app. The USB + Serial model would be completely useless.
Printer | Connectivity | Image printing | |
---|---|---|---|
EPSON TM-T20II Model: Ethernet | Ethernet | ||
EPSON TM-T82 | Ethernet | ||
EPSON TM-T82II | Ethernet, WiFi with dongle | ||
EPSON TM-T88V | Ethernet, WiFi | ||
STAR TSP143III Models: Ethernet (LAN) or Wi-Fi (WLAN) | Ethernet / WiFi | Buy now | |
STAR TSP654 Model: Ethernet (LAN) | Ethernet | Buy now |
These printers work ok and we actively support them as well:
Although the order taking app allows you to connect a thermal printer via Bluetooth, we don’t recommend it. Here’s why:
USB connection proved to be quite unreliable, that’s why we’ve decided to remove it from the Order Taking App. It turns out that it’s difficult to keep printing and charging at the same time:
We also had to cut out SMS printing. Some orders are long enough to exceed the SMS limit. The end result is that the printout does not contain all items.