Updated August 2026. The original version of this post is from 2021 — the way we do the printing has changed since, and the update is further down.
Restaurant’s have all realized the importance of online orders. Now restaurants can afford to have, and manage, their own online ordering system. We recently perfected this with a local restaurant and client of ours, The Schwarma Company.
Online orders to accommodate any menu
The trick with restaurant orders is having something that is powerful and flexible enough to accommodate any restaurant menu and all the possible menu variations, complete with cost implications. We found the solution. What we have is an e-shop to manage the basic products and sales etc which we add onto your existing WordPress website (or we can create a new one). And onto this we added a powerful product variations tool which does allow us to digitize ANY restaurant’s menu.
What’s more it can put the entire menu onto one page, with pictures and more. Of course, it is totally mobile friendly too. Works like a charm on phones. It has a cart function which people are used to and on checkout users can even create an account for simple login the next time. This also means you start to get email addresses for your clients!
Full order management for restaurants
Taking orders is only half the battle, you also need to manage them. Our backend offers full order management facilities. Change order statuses, add order notes, even email the notes to the client.
Time slots allows you to control the flow. We can add time slots for takeaways and deliveries, plus set the max amount of orders per time slot. This way you can completely control the flow of orders and ensure you never take more orders than you can fulfil. Reputation is everything after all.
Takeaway, delivery and table orders
Our system is designed for takeaway orders AND/OR delivery orders AND/OR table orders. It is super powerful and flexible… this is how to take your restaurant into the 21st century!
Automatic order printing on a thermal printer
By far the best bit is the automatic order printing.
The problem it solves is not really a technical one. A WooCommerce order arrives as an email, and in a quiet office that is fine. In a kitchen at seven on a Friday night it is not fine, because nobody is watching an inbox. The order sits there, and the first anyone knows about it is a customer phoning to ask where their food is.
So the order has to become paper, on its own, without anybody clicking anything.
In 2021 we did this with a small controller box installed at the restaurant, wired to your internet, watching for new orders and pushing them to a 58mm Bluetooth thermal printer. It worked well and several of our clients ran it for years. Here it is running at the time:
But that approach meant a site visit, a piece of hardware to look after, and a call to us whenever the router changed. That is the part that has changed, and it is worth explaining properly.
What actually changed since 2021
Two things, and together they removed the hardware.
Android phones got cheap and reliable enough to do the job. Any old handset — the one in your drawer — has more than enough power to watch a mailbox and drive a printer over Bluetooth or your network.
And the ordering platforms all settled on the same behaviour: whatever you use, it emails you the order. WooCommerce does. Shopify does. Wix does. Your booking system does. That email arrives whether or not anyone is looking, and it contains everything a kitchen ticket needs.
Put those together and the controller box stops being necessary. A phone by the till can read the order email and print it, and there is nothing else to install, host or maintain.
The options for printing WooCommerce orders, honestly compared
If you are weighing this up for your own restaurant, there are really four routes.
A cloud-enabled printer. A printer with its own internet connection that receives print jobs directly. These work well and need no computer. They are also the most expensive option by a distance — you are buying a new printer to solve what is fundamentally a software problem, and there is usually a monthly fee on top.
A print service on a computer at the shop. PrintNode, BizPrint, Printus and similar. Reliable, well supported, and genuinely the right answer for a busy multi-printer operation. The catch is the computer: it has to stay on, stay awake, and not get switched off by whoever locks up.
A WooCommerce plugin plus one of the above. Plugins handle the WooCommerce side neatly, but almost all of them still need something at the premises to hold the print job, because a web page cannot push a job to a local printer on its own. That is a browser security limit, not a shortcoming of the plugin.
Print from the order email. The route we use now. An Android phone reads the mailbox the order emails land in and prints each new order to a thermal receipt printer. No computer, no cloud subscription, and it works regardless of what built your shop, because every platform sends email.
There is no universally right answer here. If you are running four printers across a big kitchen with rules about which ticket goes where, the print-service route is better and I would tell you so. For a single counter with one or two printers — which is most restaurants — the phone is cheaper, simpler, and has fewer things that can break. And if you are wondering whether a POS system would cover this for you, I answered that one separately in do I need a POS system to print my online orders.
What I build for clients now
For a restaurant client the shape of the job has not changed much: WooCommerce for the menu and the variations, order management, time slots to control the flow, delivery and collection.
What has changed is the last mile. Instead of installing a controller I set up an app on a phone next to the printer. It reads the order mailbox and prints every order as it lands. It costs the client nothing to try, and if the phone dies they can replace it themselves with one they already own.
Here is the current version doing the same job the controller box used to do, set up from scratch:
The app is called OrderPrint — I built it, off the back of doing this the hard way for restaurant clients for years. There is a full setup guide on the OrderPrint WooCommerce page, and the first 100 orders a month are free, so you can prove it works in your own kitchen before spending anything.
If you would rather someone else set the whole thing up — the shop, the menu, the ordering, the printing — that is what I do. Get in touch and we can talk about your menu.
One thing worth knowing whichever route you take
Whatever you use, find out what it does when it stops.
The failure that costs you money is not the printer that breaks — somebody notices that in five minutes. It is the one that goes quiet: paper out, phone asleep, router rebooted, mailbox password expired. Everyone carries on believing orders are printing, and the first sign of trouble is an angry phone call.
Ask whether your setup alerts you when a print fails, whether the order survives so it can be printed again, and whether you can tell at a glance that the thing is alive. I wrote up the common causes and what to check in when the kitchen printer stops and nobody notices.
That question matters more than which printer you buy.