Do I need a POS system?
Every restaurant client asks me this within about a fortnight of their new ordering site going live. The orders are coming in, everyone is pleased, and then somebody says: we need a POS system, don’t we, so the orders print in the kitchen?
Almost always the answer is no. And it is worth explaining why, because a point of sale system is one of the more expensive things a small restaurant can be talked into.
What a POS is actually for
A point of sale system exists to handle sales that happen at the counter. Somebody walks in, orders, and the POS takes the money, records the sale, adjusts stock, prints a receipt for the customer, and gives you a day-end report that ties back to your till float.
That is genuinely useful if you have walk-in trade. It is a shop’s cash register with a computer in it.
But look at what an online order is: the sale already happened. It happened on your website, the customer already paid, and it is already recorded. Nothing about that transaction needs a till.
The only thing you actually want is the order, on paper, in the kitchen, without anyone clicking anything. That is a much smaller problem than a POS solves — and it is why paying for a POS to get it is a bit like buying a car because you need a lift into town.
Why the confusion is understandable
Two reasons, and neither is anybody being daft.
The first is that POS companies sell printing as a feature, and they are not wrong — their systems do print. So if you search for how to get orders printing, you land on POS websites, because those are the people spending money on advertising.
The second is more subtle. Some POS systems will not print your online orders at all, even though they sit right there with a printer attached. Shopify’s own POS is the clearest example: the receipt printer is driven by the POS app, and the POS app prints POS sales. An online order never enters that flow. Buy the POS, plug in the printer, and the thing you wanted still does not happen.
That is a horrible discovery to make after spending the money, and I have watched a client make it.
What you actually need
Three things, and you probably have two of them.
A thermal receipt printer. An ordinary one, 58mm or 80mm, Bluetooth or on your network. Not a label printer — those speak a different language entirely and will never work, whatever the listing says.
Something that watches for new orders. This is the only real decision, and I have written up the options in full over on automatic order printing on a thermal printer. The short version: a cloud printer does it with no computer but costs the most; a print service does it well but needs a machine left running at the shop; or you can print from the order email, which needs neither.
Somewhere for it to run. If you go the email route, an old Android phone by the till is enough. Plugged in, screen on, doing one job.
Here is the whole thing working, start to finish:
When a POS genuinely is the right answer
I am not against POS systems. I am against buying one for the wrong reason.
Get one if you have real walk-in trade and need to take payment at a counter. Get one if you need stock to move as things sell, across both online and in-person. Get one if you need proper day-end reconciliation because you handle cash and you have staff.
Those are all good reasons and a POS earns its money on every one of them. “I want my online orders to print” is not on the list, and if that is the only thing driving the purchase, you are buying a lot of machinery for one small job.
The arithmetic, roughly
A POS setup for a small restaurant — terminal, printer, software subscription — will generally run you into five figures to start, plus a monthly fee, plus the training.
Printing from the order email needs a thermal printer you may already own and a phone you almost certainly already own, plus a small monthly subscription once you are past a hundred orders a month.
If you need what a POS does, that difference is money well spent. If all you need is tickets in the kitchen, it is not.
What I set up for restaurant clients
WooCommerce on their WordPress site for the menu — with proper variations, because restaurant menus are all variations once you look closely. Order management, time slots to control how many orders land in any half hour, delivery and collection handled separately.
And then the printing, which for most clients is now an app on a phone next to the printer rather than any extra hardware. It reads the order mailbox and prints each order as it arrives.
That app is OrderPrint — I built it, after doing this the hard way for restaurant clients for years. There is a setup guide for WooCommerce on the OrderPrint WooCommerce page, and the first hundred orders a month are free, so a client can prove it works in their own kitchen before committing to anything.
The question I would ask instead
If you are weighing this up, the useful question is not “do I need a POS”. It is:
What happens when the printing stops?
Because it will, occasionally — paper runs out, a router reboots, a phone gets switched off. The setup that costs you money is not the one that fails, it is the one that fails quietly, while everyone carries on believing orders are printing. I went through the usual causes in when the kitchen printer stops and nobody notices.
Ask that of any system you are shown, POS or otherwise. It tells you more than the feature list will.
If you would like the whole thing set up — the site, the menu, the ordering and the printing — get in touch and we can talk through your menu.