And that got me thinking.

The itch

I build a lot of pages. And over the years I’ve developed strong opinions about how a Divi page should be put together – not just how it looks, but how it’s constructed so it stays maintainable:

• Native modules, always. If Divi has a module for it, use the module – don’t drop in a lump of custom code that nobody can edit later in the Visual Builder.
• No inline CSS. Styling belongs in the module’s own settings, not sprinkled through the markup.
• Global colours and fonts, referenced by name. Change a brand colour in one place and the whole site follows. That’s the whole point of a design system.
• The right layout tool for the job – flexible columns for content, CSS Grid for card layouts.

Building pages that follow all of those rules, every time, by hand, is a bit of a grind. It’s the kind of disciplined, repetitive work that’s easy to get slightly wrong when you’re tired or in a hurry.

So I taught my AI assistant to do it my way

I’ve been using Claude (Anthropic’s AI) as a coding partner for a while now. And it occurred to me that instead of describing my “house rules” over and over, I could just… teach it once. Properly.

So I built what’s called a skill – a little package of instructions and tools that teaches Claude exactly how I like Divi 5 pages built. Now I describe a page in a compact, readable spec (roughly: “a hero section with this heading and image, then a three-card feature row, then a call-to-action”), and it produces a real Divi 5 page – native modules, global colours, no inline CSS, the works – straight onto the site over WordPress’s own API.

And here’s the part I care about most: because it uses native modules, everything it builds is still fully editable in the Divi Visual Builder afterwards. It’s not a black box, and it’s not locking anything down. It just does the careful, rule-following construction so I can spend my time on the design decisions that actually matter.

Here’s roughly what a page spec looks like – nothing scary:

{
  "sections": [
    {
      "background": { "color": "gcid-primary-color" },
      "rows": [{
        "columns": [{
          "modules": [
            { "type": "heading", "level": "h1", "text": "Build Divi 5 pages from a spec" },
            { "type": "text", "html": "<p>Native modules. Global colours. No inline CSS.</p>" },
            { "type": "button", "text": "Get started", "url": "#" }
          ]
        }]
      }]
    }
  ]
}

That compiles into proper Divi 5 block markup and lands on the site as a real, editable page.

Why I’m putting it on GitHub, for free

Honestly? Because it’s been so useful to me that it felt a bit selfish to keep it in a drawer. I’ve been using it across a bunch of Divi 5 projects and it just keeps saving me time and keeping my pages tidy.

So I’ve cleaned it up, written it up, and published it as free, open-source software (MIT licensed) on GitHub. If you build with Divi 5 and you’re comfortable with a little Node.js, you might find it handy too. And if you improve it – add support for a module I haven’t covered yet, fix something, make it better – pull requests are very welcome. That’s the beauty of open source: it gets better when people use it.

👉 Get it on GitHub

A few honest caveats

• This is a community project – completely independent, not affiliated with or endorsed by Elegant Themes. I’m just a happy Divi user who built a tool for himself and decided to share it.
• Divi 5 is still evolving quickly. The page format was worked out against real, live sites and verified – but it can change between releases. Always try it on a staging site first.
• It’s a developer tool. You’ll need a WordPress site running Divi 5, a WordPress Application Password, and Node.js. The README walks through all of it.

That’s it

I made a thing that makes my own work with a theme I love a little easier, and I’m sharing it in case it helps someone else. If you give it a spin, I’d genuinely love to hear how it goes – and if you build something great with it, even better.

Happy building. 🛠️

Related reading: cheap website design that still looks professional, beautiful WordPress websites without coding, the sites I have built.

The post I taught my AI to build Divi 5 pages the way I like them – and I’m giving it away for free appeared first on Internet UPstart.

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.

The post Do I need a POS system to print my online orders? appeared first on Internet UPstart.

That one feature is the reason I have spent the last while building something new. Because the problem is not limited to restaurants, and it is not limited to my software.

The problem is bigger than restaurants

Almost every platform that sells things online will email you when an order comes in. WooCommerce does. Shopify does. Wix does. Your booking system does. The delivery apps do. Every one of those emails lands in an inbox that somebody has to actually look at.

In a quiet office that is fine. In a kitchen at seven on a Friday night, it is not fine. Nobody is looking at a phone. The notification makes a noise that nobody hears. The order sits there. And then a customer phones to ask where their food is, and the answer – the honest answer – is that nobody saw the email.

The existing fixes for this all have a catch:

• Cloud printers. A printer with its own internet connection that receives print jobs directly. They work well. They also cost several thousand rand, and you are buying a new printer to solve a software problem.
• PC-tethered print services. A small program runs on a computer in the shop and talks to the printer over USB. Also works. Also means a computer must live in the shop, stay on, stay awake, and not get switched off by whoever locks up.
• Platform-specific plugins. Excellent if you are on the one platform they support. Useless the moment you take orders from two places, which almost everybody eventually does.

What nobody was selling was the obvious one: use the email. The email already exists. It already contains the order. It arrives whether you are on WooCommerce or Shopify or a booking form somebody built you in 2014. If a cheap Android phone could read that inbox and drive a Bluetooth thermal printer, the whole problem goes away for the price of hardware most people already have in a drawer.

So I built it. It is called OrderPrint, it is on Google Play, and it went from an idea to a published app in nine days.

What it actually does

An old Android phone sits by the till, plugged in. It is signed in to the mailbox your order emails arrive in. Every thirty seconds it checks that mailbox, and when a new order email appears it renders a proper receipt and sends it to your thermal printer over Bluetooth. Nobody touches anything.

The parts that matter:

• It works with any platform that emails you an order. WooCommerce, Shopify and Wix get purpose-built parsing so the ticket comes out looking like a real receipt with the items, quantities, totals, customer, and delivery details in the right places. Anything else falls back to printing a cleaned-up version of the email, so the app is useful on day one even on a platform I have never seen.
• There is no server. None. There is no OrderPrint account to create, no cloud service in the middle, nothing to subscribe to a hosting bill for. Your mailbox password and your customers’ orders live on your phone and go nowhere else. I could not read your orders if I wanted to, because there is nowhere for them to be sent.
• It runs multiple printers. A kitchen ticket and a counter copy from the same order, on any paid plan.
• It prints when the order was placed, not just when it printed. More on why that one small line matters below.
• The first hundred orders a month are free, with a small OrderPrint line at the bottom of the receipt. Paid plans start at about $7 a month and drop the line.

The interesting part: what actually went wrong

Anybody can describe an app that works. The useful thing to write down is the list of things that broke, because every one of them is a trap that any developer building something similar is going to walk into.

Android kills long-running apps, and it has got worse

This is the whole game. An app that must run for eighteen hours straight, unattended, on a cheap phone, is fighting the operating system the entire time. Android is actively designed to stop what this app is trying to do.

The predecessor to this app used a foreground service declared as a dataSync type. That was correct and normal for years. Then Android 15 introduced a six-hour daily cap on exactly that service type – and every day, six hours in, the app was killed. In a shop that means printing silently stops mid-afternoon and nobody knows until an order goes missing.

The fix was to declare the service as connectedDevice instead, which is both more honest about what the app does (it is talking to a printer) and not subject to that cap. If you are building anything that must stay alive on modern Android, choose your foreground service type on the basis of which restrictions it carries, not which name sounds right.

The receipts were coming out cut in half

Big orders printed fine up to a point and then just stopped, mid-item. Small orders were perfect.

The cause is one of my favourite bugs of the last few years. The app was writing the receipt to the Bluetooth socket and then closing it, which is what you would do with any normal stream. But a thermal printer is a slow physical machine with a small buffer. Closing the socket the instant the last byte is handed over does not mean the printer has printed it – it means the printer is still chewing through the buffer when the connection disappears underneath it, and whatever had not been committed to paper is simply lost.

The fix is to hold the socket open after the final byte and give the printer time to drain. Which feels wrong, and is right.

The notification played no sound, and deleting the channel did not help

Orders were arriving, printing correctly, and the phone was vibrating without making a sound. The code very clearly asked for a sound.

Android freezes a notification channel’s settings at the moment the channel is first created. Change the sound or the importance in your code afterwards and nothing happens – the OS keeps honouring what was set the first time the channel was registered, and it will keep doing so forever. Uninstalling does not always clear it either.

The only real fix is to create a new channel with a new ID. And the reason the bug survived so long is more embarrassing than the bug: the channel IDs had been moved to shared constants, but two show() calls still passed the old ID as a bare string, quietly recreating the retired channel every time they fired. The lesson I took from it was to stop testing “does it use the right channel ID” and start testing the actual invariant – every notification this app posts must go to a channel this app created. That test would have caught it on day one.

Reinstalling the app printed sixty-three old orders

This one is my favourite, because the bug was in a feature I never wrote.

I had been testing on one phone for days, then installed the app on a second phone against the same mailbox. It immediately printed sixty-three orders from the previous weeks. All correctly formatted, all completely unwanted, and all costing real paper.

The app keeps a marker of the last order email it has seen, so that a fresh install ignores everything already in the mailbox and only prints new arrivals. That marker is stored in the phone’s normal app storage – and Android’s Auto Backup, which is on by default unless you explicitly say otherwise, had quietly backed it up and restored it onto the new phone. The restored marker pointed at a position in a mailbox that phone had never read, so the app dutifully concluded that sixty-three orders were new.

Two fixes, because one was not enough:

1. Turn off Auto Backup properly. On Android 12 and up that means dataExtractionRules, not the older fullBackupContent that most search results still show you.
2. Assume it will happen anyway. The app now watches for the shape of the disaster rather than its cause: if a batch arrives containing ten or more orders that are more than a day old, it holds those back instead of printing them and shows a banner offering “print them all” or “not needed”. Fresh orders in the same batch still print immediately – the guard partitions the batch rather than judging it as a whole, because one stale straggler must never hold up nine real orders.

That second fix is the one I would recommend to anybody. Fixing the cause is necessary. Assuming you have not found every cause is what stops it reaching a customer.

Polling every thirty seconds, on purpose

IMAP has a feature called IDLE that lets a server push new mail to a client instead of the client asking. It is more elegant, it uses less battery, and I deliberately did not use it.

An IDLE connection that has quietly died looks exactly like an IDLE connection on which nothing has happened. On a shop phone, overnight, behind a router that drops idle connections, that failure mode means the app looks perfectly healthy and prints nothing. A thirty-second poll cannot fail that way: either it completes or it visibly errors.

I proved it rather than assumed it. A fifteen-hour overnight soak with no orders at all, then three orders in the morning without touching the phone – all three printed within seconds, 588 polls with a longest gap of exactly thirty seconds, no wake-up delay. Elegance loses to legibility when a business depends on it.

The small feature nobody asks for until they need it

Receipts print the time the order was received. Obvious. But if the app has been stuck, or the phone was off, or the mailbox was slow, “received” and “placed” are not the same time – and the person reading tickets all day is the one who will notice something is wrong.

So every ticket now prints both, one above the other:

Placed: 17 Aug 2026, 18:42
Printed: 17 Aug 2026, 18:43

When those two lines match, everything is fine. When they do not, the person holding the paper knows immediately, without needing to be told what to look for. It is two lines of code and it turns the receipt into a diagnostic.

Was it worth building?

The whole thing is about eight hundred automated tests deep and has been running unattended on a cheap phone next to a printer for weeks. Nine days from the first sketch to a published app on Google Play, which still feels faster than it has any right to.

But the thing I would want another developer to take away from this is not the timeline. It is that every genuine bug in that list was found by running it on the actual hardware, not by reading the code. The truncated receipts, the silent notification, the sixty-three-order flood, the display that did not come back after a reboot – not one of those was visible on a screen. They needed paper, a printer, a real mailbox, and the patience to leave it running overnight and look at what happened.

If you want it

• The app: orderprint.app – with setup guides for WooCommerce, Shopify and Wix
• On Google Play: OrderPrint
• Help and setup: orderprint.app/help-and-support

You need an Android phone (an old one is genuinely fine), a Bluetooth thermal receipt printer, and a mailbox that receives your orders. The first hundred orders a month cost nothing.

And if what you actually need is the whole ordering system rather than just the printing, that is a different conversation – I wrote about automatic order printing as part of a full restaurant ordering setup previously, and I still build those. Get in touch.

The post I Built an App That Prints Your Online Orders Automatically – From Any Platform That Emails You appeared first on Internet UPstart.

Cheap website design, by design

I am going to give you the answer right here in the second paragraph, for those of you who can’t concentrate any further, and that is “templates”. In one word, templates. I know you’re thinking that’s a cop out. But that is actually not the case at all, especially when you’re looking at some of the very top end, professional templates that are available today.

Well, to be more accurate in today’s WordPress environment, it is more about the right page builder. Yes, I know about the default block system which is great and getting better each day BUT, in my opinion, there are two standout pagebuilders that just have a huge headstart in the block system. And those are Divi and Elementor. I have used all the pagebuilders out there and these two are by FAR the best, each in their own way. Now my personal favourite is Divi. But I have used Elementor PRO and it is actually easier for clients to understand/use.

But, again in my humble opinion, Divi is better and just that much more flexible. So Elementor PRO and Divi are both great pagebuilders but the real reason why is the myriad of templates they make available to us to use. These are both products that you purchase. And to stay top, both of these products have invested money into designers to create templates that we can re-use. And they have use brilliant designers, let me tell you. These are people who understand websites. And there is a huge amount of designs to choose from, something to suit any kind of website. Of course you can still customise the template, all it does is speed up the build time dramatically.

Cheap website design that looks professional

So what is happening is that proper, professional designers are designing websites for these companies. Websites which then become complete ‘templates’ that web developers can deploy in seconds. What this means for the end user (the client) is that you can get a professionally designed website, without the cost of a professional designer. You simply select the template you think would best suit your brand and off you go to development. That’s how you get cheap website design that looks absolutely professional.

You do still need some design. You will need a logo BUT there are lots of do it yourself logo design tools out there today, so you might not need a designer here either. To further customise it to your needs/identity, you can also easily change the default fonts and colours that are used. This is something that is easy to do across the whole design, in both Divi and Elementor designed sites. And highly recommend you do!

Cheap website design without a designer

So if you were paying attention above, you would have noticed that it is by cutting out the designer that you really manage to make your website cost cheaper. You can/should still get a really great looking website, a site that looks professional at least. Do you get a better website if you have a designer completely custom design something for your company? Yes, I think you do in most cases (there are some bad designers out there so check the portfolio if you go this route). But if you cannot afford that, then this is the next best thing!

If you get a website that is based on some bulk distributed ‘template’ will your website users be able to tell? Probably not. I think the only users who might know are developers like myself who are able to spot template designs. The trick is to start with a template and then customise it completely. Change the fonts, the colours and tweak the design to your needs. Change all the stock images for your own images. And make sure the text tells the right story about you. Then no-one will know you started with a ‘template’.

​How to make a cheap website even cheaper

So the trick to getting a cheap website design is to skip out the designer. And the trick to getting a cheap website build is to skip the builder. By that I mean build it yourself. While this might seem like a good idea, I promise it will distract much time and attention from your core business (whatever that is) and in the end, it is unlikely you will produce something really professional looking. So this is not recommended. Websites built by a professional developer will work better in the long terms, that I can guarantee.

So, in my opinion, you can get a cheap website design that still looks custom and professional, but you do need to use an experienced developer to make your website happen. And luckily, you are in the right place for that. So if you want a cheap website design that looks proper expensive, please complete your details below, and the Internet UPstart will build your website:

Photo by Tranmautritam

Related reading: how much a website costs in South Africa, web developer or website designer, which do you need, beautiful WordPress websites without coding, how to create a website.

The post Cheap website design appeared first on Internet UPstart.

But before you jump in, I did find this article on Forbes that offers some really good advice for BEFORE you leap.

How to start a business with no money or products

The first suggestion is that you find restaurants, fast food kitchens and similar businesses in your area that have products that you can sell. Then go have a chat to them. Ask them if they want their own web shop to get started. If they are not interested in their own web shop, ask them if you can sell their products on your website.

If you find a restaurant that wants a web shop you can actually build it for them (and charge for this) or get it built for them (and charge for this). The easiest and simplest way to do this is to use a 3rd party service that supplies instant web shops, like Resto. They offer a 2 month free trial which is more than enough time to actually setup the shop and start selling before you need to pay for the digital shop! The great thing about Resto is that they do not take any revenue, they simply charge a very reasonable, flat hosting fee for their shops.

What’s more, Resto shops will connect to local payment gateways. That means that when someone buys something from you, the money goes directly to your own account!

How to deliver the products

In terms of delivery you can either let the restaurant be responsible for this themselves OR you could start another business’ of deliveries. First you’ll need to find some delivery people in your area. Then you can connect your Resto shops to another service called Shipday. Resto will then automatically send your new orders to Shipday via API. Shipday has an admin portal which you can use to assign (or auto-assign) orders to delivery people. It also has an app for the delivery people to use to ‘accept’ the delivery order and update the order status as they go. And, of course, the end user can track the delivery right to their house. You can find out more about this here.

The best part is that Shipday is free for up to 300 deliveries a month. So you can easily get started with no money at all. By the time you are getting more than 300 orders a month, you should be making money already.

How else to start a business (or expand the idea above)

My second suggestion is that you do not limit the products’ you can resell. What that means is that if you are going around your area, speaking to companies about selling their products on a web shop, there are many more digital products you can sell to them. For example web site URL’s (domains), email and hosting. Just get an account with Xneelo or Afrihost (local hosting suppliers) and you can resell these added digital services.

You can even make and sell simple mobile apps for local companies. You just use another 3rd party services called UPstart apps. They allow you to completely build the mobile app without paying anything. You only need to start paying when you want to publish the app. So you can get your client to pay BEFORE you have to publish it. The best part is that you do not need to know how to code to build apps on their service. It uses a simple drag and drop interface to build apps. It even includes unlimited push notifications with the hosting fees once you are published.

You can even sell complete websites without knowing how to make one. This one is simple, if you find a business in your area that wants a complete website, you can speak to us here at The Internet UPstart. We will happily quote you to design and build any kind of website you can imagine. From simple pamphlet sites to complex content systems or intricate web shops, we can do it all! Just send us your client’s requirements and we will quote you. You can then add your markup and go back to your client with an offer. Here you get the client to supply the full deposit so you do not have to use your own money to do this!

How to expand and grow this type of business

What you will find, once you have your first few client’s using some of the above services, is that they will start asking about more, related type services. For example they might be looking for social media account creation and management. Or they might be looking for someone to write blog articles to go on their website. Or they might want someone to do search engine marketing for them. All of these are things that you can outsource.

When an existing client says to you “can you help me with this”, always say “yes, I can!” Even if you don’t know exactly how you are going to help you client, say yes! Just tell your client you don’t have all the info available at the moment but let me take down your requirements, then I’ll speak to my team and get back to you ASAP… Then write down what your client wants and when you get back to the office, use Google to find someone to do it for you. Find out what it will cost, add on some mark-up and go back to sell to your client, easy peasy!

Conclusion

To easiest way to start your own business without any money is to resell other people’s products or services. And then to sell a bunch of value added products and services to these clients in the process. The trick is to make sure that your client either pays in full or enough of a deposit, so that you do not have to use any of your own capital in the process. What you will find with most development projects is that they require a 50% deposit. If that is the case, you need to ensure your client pays that 50% (plus your markup) before any work starts. And this is how you start without using your own money!

Photo by Thirdman

The post How to start a business without any money (or products) in South Africa appeared first on Internet UPstart.

Step 1: Install WordPress

The first step is to install WordPress. If you don’t already have a website, you’ll need to sign up for a web hosting account. There are many different hosting providers to choose from, but we recommend Xneelo because they offer a free SSL certificate and 24/7 support.

Once you have a hosting account, you can install WordPress with just a few clicks. Most hosting providers offer an easy-to-use WordPress installation tool, and you can find more information about the process in the hosting provider’s documentation.

Step 2: Install WooCommerce

With WordPress installed, the next step is to install the WooCommerce plugin. To do this, go to the “Plugins” section in your WordPress dashboard, click on “Add New,” and search for “WooCommerce.” Once you find the WooCommerce plugin, click “Install” and then “Activate.”

Step 3: Set up WooCommerce

Once you’ve installed and activated the WooCommerce plugin, you’ll be prompted to run the setup wizard. The setup wizard will walk you through the process of setting up your shop, including creating pages for your shop, cart, and checkout, as well as configuring your shipping and tax settings.

Step 4: Add Products

With WooCommerce set up, you can now start adding products to your shop. To do this, go to the “Products” section in your WordPress dashboard, and click on “Add New.” Here, you can enter all of the information about your product, including its name, description, price, and images.

Step 5: Customize Your Shop

With your products added, you can now start customizing your shop. To do this, go to the “Appearance” section in your WordPress dashboard and select “Themes.” Here, you can choose a theme that matches the look and feel of your shop. There are many free and paid themes to choose from, and you can find more information about the process in the WordPress documentation.

Step 6: Set Up Payment Methods

To start accepting payments, you’ll need to set up a payment gateway. WooCommerce integrates with many different payment gateways, including PayPal and Stripe. To set up a payment gateway, go to the “WooCommerce” section in your WordPress dashboard, and click on “Settings.” From there, click on the “Payments” tab and select the payment gateway you want to use.

For local gateways you can sign-up with either Payfast or Yoco. Both of them offer a Woocommerce plugin to integrate to their payment services.

Step 7: Shipping and Tax Settings

To configure your shipping and tax settings, go to the “WooCommerce” section in your WordPress dashboard, and click on “Settings.” From there, click on the “Shipping” and “Tax” tabs to configure the settings for each.

Step 8: Launch Your Shop

With all of your products, themes, payment methods, and shipping and tax settings in place, it’s time to launch your shop. To do this, simply go to your website’s home page, and you’ll see your shop is now live. You can start taking orders and accepting payments right away.

Conclusion

Creating a shop in WordPress using WooCommerce is an easy and affordable way to get started with an online store. With the help of this plugin, you can have a fully functional shop up and running in just a few hours. Whether you’re selling physical goods, digital products, or both, WooCommerce has you covered.

One of the great things about using WordPress and WooCommerce is the level of customization you can achieve. With a wide range of themes, plugins, and custom code available, you can make your shop look and work exactly the way you want. This level of customization makes it possible to create a truly unique shopping experience for your customers.

Another advantage of using WooCommerce is its versatility. Whether you’re starting out with just a few products or have an extensive catalog, WooCommerce can handle it. Additionally, it offers a range of features, such as inventory management, order tracking, and product variations, which are essential for running a successful online store.

In conclusion, if you’re looking to create an online store, WordPress and WooCommerce are a great place to start. With its ease of use, versatility, and customization options, it’s the perfect solution for businesses of all sizes. So, go ahead and give it a try, and you’ll soon see why so many people choose WooCommerce for their online stores.

Photo by Negative Space: View on Pexels

EDIT 18/09/2023:

There is a quicker and easier option available now, please visit Resto orders for more information.

Related reading: taking food orders online, automatic order printing for restaurants, how to start a business without money or products, the advantages of WordPress for a business website.

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Advantages of WordPress – ease of use

One of the biggest advantages of using WordPress for your business website is its ease of use. The platform is designed for non-technical users and offers a simple, intuitive interface that makes it easy to create and manage content. This means that you don’t need to be a web developer or designer to create a professional-looking website that effectively showcases your business.

Flexibility

Another advantage of WordPress is its flexibility. The platform offers a wide range of customization options, including thousands of templates and themes, as well as a large community of developers and designers who are constantly creating new plugins and add-ons that can be used to enhance your website’s functionality. This means that you can easily create a unique and engaging website that is tailored to your specific business needs. WordPress is also a great choice for businesses that want to be able to update their website regularly. The platform allows you to create new pages and posts, upload images and videos, and make other changes to your website with minimal effort. This makes it easy to keep your website up-to-date with the latest information about your products and services, as well as news and updates about your business.

Search engine optimised

In addition to its ease of use, flexibility, and ability to be updated easily, WordPress is also very search engine friendly. The platform is built with best practices in mind and is optimized for search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This means that your website will be more easily discoverable by potential customers, which can help drive traffic and increase conversions.

Scalable and cost effective

Another advantage of using WordPress for your business website is its scalability. The platform can handle websites of all sizes, from small personal blogs to large e-commerce sites. This means that as your business grows, your website can easily scale to meet your needs. Finally, WordPress is a cost-effective solution for businesses. The platform is open-source software, which means that it is free to download and use. You will only need to pay for hosting, a domain name, and any additional add-ons or themes that you may want to use. This makes it a great option for businesses that are working with a tight budget.

To sum it up…

In conclusion, WordPress is a powerful and versatile platform that offers a wide range of advantages for businesses. Its ease of use, flexibility, ability to be updated easily, search engine friendliness, scalability, and cost-effectiveness make it an ideal choice for businesses looking to establish a strong online presence. With WordPress, you can create a professional-looking website that effectively showcases your business and helps you to reach and engage with potential customers. Featured Photo by Markus Winkler: view on Pexels Photo by Pixabay: view on Pexels

Related reading: how to create a website, cheap website design that still looks professional, creating a shop in WordPress with WooCommerce, beautiful WordPress websites without coding.

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How to order food online

The challenge for food ordering online is the many different variations and addons that restaurants offer for their different dishes. For example…a dish is served with chips or rice or vegies. And if you choose vegies then we need to offer the user a choice of 6 vegies from which they can choose a maximum of 3 per serving. And it must all happen on one page which is mobile friendly. That is a serious challenge.

Fortunately we have found an elegant solution using WordPress and Woocommerce. Obviously some modification was/is required to customise the setup to each restaurant’s particular needs. But we did find a way to make it possible to accommodate even the most difficult restaurant menu. We can add any kind of variations to your main menu items (products), variations which can affect the price too. This ensures that the client gets what they want AND an accurate cost, immediately! And these orders can be placed on one (mobile friendly) page.

Another challenge is that restaurant staff are busy, they do not have time to check a device, to print new orders. What restaurants need is for these orders to print automatically. We also found an elegant solution for this. A solution which will work for a single restaurant or a restaurant chain. Quite simply we have a printer controller which checks for new orders every minute and if/when it finds a new order, it automatically prints the order to an attached thermal printer. This means that new online food orders are automatically printed on-site within a minute.

Aah, but what about deliveries you ask….I am glad you asked!

Order food online for delivery

For a restaurant that is managing their own deliveries the biggest problem is being overwhelmed with orders during the busy times. [Of course some restaurants only wish they had this problem!] The solution we found is both simple and very effective.

Our ordering software allows you to create timeslots for every day. And then it allows you to limit the amount of orders the system can take during any specific timeslot. This way you can ensure that the amount of orders never exceeds the amount of delivery drivers you have available. Also, and perhaps most importantly, you can easily manage user expectations. Users will only be able to order a delivery in an available timeslot. This way the client knows, before they order, how long it is going to take to get their food.

Order food and pay online

For the best in user convenience, especially in the age of Covid-19, the entire order system can be linked to various online payment providers such as Payfast and Yoco. This means that as the user places their order they can make payment by credit card. The restaurant gets an order that is already paid for. All they have to do is make the food and deliver it (or give it) to the client. And the client can simply take their food without anyone having to look for a credit machine, what a bonus!

Where can I get my online food ordering service?

So for restaurants in South Africa…more specifically in Johannesburg only, at the time of writing…we have managed to package this service via Resto orders Pty Ltd. Links below.

We are proud to be the developers behind this exciting new product.

How to get it done cheaper?

Hahaha, cheapskate! Really? There is no cheaper way to do it more effectively. That is the simple answer!

Why use Resto to order food online?

Infinitely flexible: Each Resto client is treated as an individual. This means that each Resto page can be customised exactly to each client’s requirements. Whether you want to offer custom discounts or you wish to push the client data to your external CRM, a Resto site can be customised to do it!

Order via Whatsapp: That’s right, you can set it to send the order directly to a Whatsapp number. Unfortunately this only works for a single branch/shop at this point in time but we are working on the multi-branch version.

Support and backup: Resto offers various support packages to suit everyone’s budget. But I think most importantly they offer support because they back their product 100%. And with this kind of system, I do recommend that you take a support package. Stuff happens, you know!

Own your data: With Resto you own your client data. You can view and even export your client data.

Manage it all yourself: You get access to manage everything. By that I mean your orders, your clients and your products. You will have the access details needed to login and mark items as “out of stock” or to edit the price. You can also view your orders and add notes to them too. You get access to stacks of reports too. What more could you want?

Set fees: Resto charges set fees for their services. This means that you know exactly what you will be paying. They do NOT take any kind of percentage of your business.

The biggest difference between Resto and other online food ordering services such as Mr D or Uber eats is that Resto does not charge a percentage. So the user pays the actual restaurant price.

How it works: order food online for deliver or takeaway

It is actually really simple. After you sign up with Resto they will turn your menu into an online food ordering cart system. This is actually all you need to take orders online. Client’s can place the order and it is immediately emailed to you. Now this might be ok for some places, but it is certainly not enough for most restaurants.

It is highly recommended that you also purchase a Resto printer and controller. This is a small thermal, Bluetooth printer which is connected to a small, robust laptop. The laptop has special software that checks for new orders every minute and if it finds an order, it prints it out automatically. So restaurant staff just need to notice when something has printed. Resto will connect your website’s orders to this laptop and come install it onsite (connect it to power and internet).

The laptop itself is also useful for viewing orders online and editing your products. They will show you how to do all of this.

And that is just the start of it. Any Resto order portal can be completely customized to the client’s needs. Maybe you want to add in special discounts or coupons. Maybe you want to sell gift cards or offer discount coupons. And maybe you want to send all your data to an external CRM. Whatever you want, if it is in our power, it can/will be done for you.

So please click here, go over to the Resto website and sign-up to get your very own restaurant “order food online” system…

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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.

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For more information and specifics, please visit the UPstart Mobile Apps website. But here’s the short version…it is free to register and login. Once logged in, you can create an app by giving it a name and clicking on the “create” button. Then you choose a template and layout. Adjust some settings based on that. Choose your currency. Edit the colours to fit in with your existing identity. Then add in the features you want…finally adjust your publishing settings and when you are ready to publish, subscribe. This will allow you to get the code you need to create your Android and iOS applications. Publish these to your own app store accounts and you’re live!

UPstart mobile apps offers a comprehensive video knowledgebase, packed with ‘how-to’ information which will show you exactly how to make your own app in no time at all!

Build your own mobile applications

Here is the video introduction to your UPstart apps “Dashboard”, this is where you start. Here is how you create new apps, edit existing ones, delete the oopsies and manage your apps in general.

For more, please see their Knowledge base: UPstart Apps Knowledgebase

Make your own app with powerful features

• Cross-Platform
• In one go, you can create applications that run on IPhone and Android, as well as a Webapp.
• Creation made easy
• No technical knowledge required to create your own customized applications.
• Loyalty Card
• Create a digital loyalty program featuring one or several cards.
• Discounts
• Get the store sales rolling with simple, high-performance discounts.
• Push Notifications
• Let businesses contact their clients whenever they want and whenever the need arises. It’s unlimited.
• Thorough statistics
• Keep an eye on your operations at a glance. See what features are most popular with users.
• Photo / Video gallery
• Highlight events and stores with attractive multimedia galleries.
• CRM
• Gain the advantage of a well-managed client base. Gather information to be used for targeted operations.
• News Wall
• Enable store to share with their clients and get feedback.
• Your design
• Customise every pages with your colors and every background with your images.
• Custom Pages
• Create pages with the content you need: text, photo galleries, videos, etc.
• Contact pages
• Allow one-touch-call, geolocation, links to social pages, and much more.
• Booking
• Allow users to book a place or anything you want, with an easy and multi-store plug-in.
• Unlimited pages
• Create as many custom pages as you need. It’s unlimited.
• Promoting
• Receive QR Code and POS ads to make the application known.
• Free trial
• Play with UPstart Apps as much as you like. You’ll only pay when you want to publish your application.

What kind of apps & functionality can you make?

Community apps: Schools, sports clubs, churches & any similar groups who need an app to aggregate information they post on their website, calendar & social media. Something to send push notifications to users, based on user defined interests. Somewhere they can easily and quickly add information or downloads or useful links.

Shop apps: Restaurants, coffee shops, caterers & most online shops can be easily supported. From presenting your full menu or products, to taking in app orders & payments. For loyalty cards, discount coupons and competitions. Geo-targeted push notifications for people in the area and much more.

Types of businesses/apps you can make: Job seeker, service delivery, mcommerce, local radio station, golf clubs, food trucks, markets, franchises.

Here is a video introduction to the “features tab” where you add functions to your mobile app.

What are the costs involved?

It is free to sign-up and build your app. You will only have to start paying when you publish your app. The monthly fee, when you want to publish, is R 899/month. This includes unlimited usage, installs and push notifications.

It is locally hosted and supported so you know it will work fast and the support will understand your needs!

Build your own mobile app for free

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