Solve Retail Customers' Printing Needs With Thermal Printers
This VAR is growing its retail and hospitality business by installing thermal receipt printers.
POSGlobal.com, Inc, a VAR located in Plano, TX, specializes in providing total solutions for the general retail, grocery, convenience store, and hospitality markets. POSGlobal.com sells its products and services online (www.posglobal.com), and its Web presence earned it a printer upgrade installation for Hi-Health Supermart.
Hi-Health sells more than 3,000 types of vitamins, minerals, health foods, and nutritional supplements online (www.hihealth.com) and in more than 50 Hi-Health Supermart stores across Arizona. While Hi-Health Supermart customers may be on the road to good health, they were at a standstill when it came to the checkout lines. The culprit? Slow dot matrix receipt printers that made checking out on weekends and at peak times a nightmare, according to Vincent Wen of POSGlobal.com. Hi-Health found itself losing customers as people simply left without buying anything, rather than stand in line and wait. In addition to being slow (printing only 2.5 lines per second), Hi-Health's receipt printers were noisy, and cashiers found it difficult to change the printer ribbons. As a result, some customers' receipts were hard to read when ribbons were running out of ink.
Install Thermal Printers For Faster Printing
Wen recommended replacing the old dot matrix printers with thermal printers to solve Hi-Health's problem of long lines and unhappy customers. Wen chose the Samsung SRP-350 model based on the printers' performance-to-cost ratio. According to Wen, the Samsung model cost 20% less than a comparable model from another manufacturer.
POSGlobal.com supplied Hi-Health with 101 Samsung SRP-350 thermal printers. The SRP-350s are virtually silent, due to thermal printing technology, and they print at a speed of 46.2 lines per second with 180 dpi (dots per inch). And, since thermal printers don't use ribbons, Hi-Health cashiers don't need to change ribbons any longer and the company saves money on printer consumables. Wen notes that the widespread use of thermal printers has helped to drive thermal paper costs down significantly, making the printers affordable for small to midsize retailers. The total cost for the installation was $30,852.
"Overall, it was a smooth transition," says Wen of Hi-Health's move from dot matrix to thermal printers. The VAR did have to reconfigure the POS software to print two copies of the receipts, since impact printers use 2-ply receipt paper. After fully integrating the thermal receipt printers, Wen notes that customers can move through checkout lines more quickly, since the Samsung SRP-350s print 17 times faster than the previously used dot matrix printers.
Following the Hi-Health installation, which was completed in February, POSGlobal.com is continuing to recommend thermal printers to its retail and hospitality customers. Since the Hi-Health deploment, POSGlobal.com has sold an additional 500 thermal printers.