Can you use an ethernet kitchen printer when in offline mode?

[FrenchPress1]

QUESTION: Can you use an ethernet kitchen printer when in offline mode?

BACK STORY:

I'm running a coffee stand with an iPad and a Square reader.  I had the opportunity to attend an event with 15-20K people.  First event this size, so I ramped up with 3 order takers (ipads and readers), a receipt printer, a kitchen printer on the bar for drinks, and 6 baristas in a 10x20 tent. 

We were doing great, pumping out drinks at the rate of 900-1,000 per hour (15/minute), raking in the $, when CRASH - the internet went down and we could no longer take cards.  We were using a hotspot to power our wifi, and apparently when 20,000 people congregate in a small area, and try to hit the same 4 cell towers, bad things happen with online data...

It was a disaster and we ended up going to cash only and losing a lot of business.  Through this I learned that 1) you can't use offline mode with square readers.  2) You can't use a swiper on an ipad without the correct dongle (which we didn't have - ipads were usb-c).  3) Offline mode is very slow if you don't turn off wifi and cellular data (it keeps trying to connect for each card).

The real question is how can I take orders and print kitchen tickets while in offline mode with the wifi turned off (so it doesn't try each card 3 times before coming up with a message that says "do you want to use offline mode for this card").  Has someone solved this?  I'm willing to get different hardware if needed.  It appears that Square Terminal will take chip cards in offline mode, but I need to be able to print kitchen tickets and take cards offline in high volume.

[TheRealChipA]

Hi @FrenchPress1.  To answer your direct question, you can not use network printers in offline mode IF you have to force offline mode by disconnecting from your WiFi network.  That’s one of the drawbacks.  Thankfully, I have a backup card processor (Stripe) so I stayed connected to the internet and rang up checks, closing the Stripe payment checks to Other.  That way I had all of my devices — receipt printer, KDS, etc.  Weirdly, but thankfully, I learned that with the POS can’t find Square on the internet it seems to go into a default offline mode, saving transactions as offline for later processing.  It worked like a charm.  But that’s only because I had a backup card processor in the Stripe mobile app and didn’t try to swipe cards on my POS at all.

I know that Square is working on a better offline mode.  I’m hoping, and have mentioned, that it would be amazing if we could toggle it on and off manually to be able to keep our networks up and running.  We’ll see.  This outage revealed a few shortcomings of the current offline mode implementation and Square seems to be very aware that there needs to be a priority on tightening the whole thing up.

[FrenchPress1]

Hi Chip,

Thanks for the reply!  Wouldn't you have the same problem with Stripe - no internet = no transactions?

[TheRealChipA]

Hi @FrenchPress1.  First, an apology.  I read something into your post, coming as soon after the huge Square outage last Thursday.  I assumed that you were referring to that outage.  So, ignore the Stripe stuff.  They don’t have offline mode in their apps and probably never will.  In fact, they strong discourage offline mode at all — even though they just rolled out a beta API to developers that allows them to do it in their own apps!  Ha.

Ignore that part.  As for the rest, like I said, the Square engineers are working hard on a better, more robust offline mode.  For now, all we can do is wait.  If I were a betting man, I’d bet that this one has an extremely high priority!

Sorry again for the misunderstanding and confusing comments that resulted. 

[DeutschEssen]

I currently run 2 KDS screen on my food truck, but they are useless when the internet goes down, often due to congestion on the network at festivals. When this happens we have to go back to hand writing tickets. We are considering adding a printer. If we do will it work without an inter net connection? Will devices "talk" to each other with a local network only? Is anyone running this kind of a setup? If so, please let me know what equipment you are using to accomplish this. Thanks!

[BernadetteA]

Thanks for reaching out, @DeutschEssen

Unfortunately, the printer must be connected to a network in order to work. 

I did move your post over to this thread in case the suggestions are relevant to you. 

[DeutschEssen]

I understand that it needs to be on a network. I guess I should have phrased it differently. Will it work on a local network without access to the internet?

[MayaP]

Hey there @DeutschEssen, I appreciate you reaching out and understand you concern about having issues with KDS when the Internet is down. I just want to clarify, when you say local network, is this open Wi-Fi network? 

[DeutschEssen]

No, it wouldn't be an open wifi network. I would be a local network with a Router in the food truck.

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[DeutschEssen]

Thanks for the info. So what I am trying to accomplish is a way to print orders when Square cloud servers are down either due to lack of internet connection on my end or their system is down. Currently I have 2 KDS screens, but they don't receive orders in either of these two scenarios. I currently run from a hot spot on my phone.

What is the best way to accomplish this?

How do I get internet from a phone hot spot to a router?

What hardware is needed?

Thanks!

[DeutschEssen]

Can I simply hook up a usb printer directly to my POS and set I as a kitchen printer to accomplish this?

[Summer2024]

Hey there, @DeutschEssen! 

The USB printers are really only used to print receipts for purchases. I'm not sure if it would function correctly as a kitchen printer. 

Tagging my friend @TheRealChipA here to see if he has any suggestions. 

[TheRealChipA]

I have not used a USB printer at all with Square.  However, I can’t see why it would be any different than any other printer.  The method it uses to connect to the network shouldn’t matter.l  If you have one, I’d just try it out.  If you don’t have one, maybe @Summer2024 can double-check with an engineer there.  I’d be surprised if you couldn’t use it that way, though.