somehow it appears to me i must be missing something fundamental, so i am starting this topic for people to chime in and tell me what that might be.

as far as i am concerend i cannot see any reason (barring perhaps one which includes propriotary hardware and API’s, see below) which requires email2fax or sms or any other gateway of that kind with their inevitably associated charges.

happy to stand corrected and please do leave your comments, but the following occurs to me

in no particular order:

regarding email2fax:

i really have no idea why anyone is still happy to have ongoing charges payable to some company that converts an email to a fax.

not only is the whole format/concept somewhat antiquated i would have thought (we are in >=2015 after all), but from what i can tell/have been told, quite frequently those conversions are also somewhat hit and miss.

furthermore, with many of those email2fax providers one also has to jump through a bunch of hoops (like attaching images to emails and whatnot) to even get this set up and it’s also not as reliable (sending delays etc) as people assume from what i can see (or have been told more accurately). Not to mention the inevitable carrier/phonecosts involved.

if one is worried that one might not receive the order emails and wants a backup (though if that’s the case one should probably investigate the server setup instead) than – surely – there are better ways.

given that netconnected printers are 10 to a penny these days, a simple cloud print solution and/or a pinter that checks another dedicated email address and prints if something’s there (and a few other options one has with these printers) sounds to me like a much better solution with the added benefit of not having those email2fax charges and issues.

ps: personally I don’t know why people still need to use paper/printouts anyway , but i accept that this might be something that is still wanted for one reason or another

regarding sms/gprs:

first of all, i am aware that there are many gprs/sms printers available that (might) let you check , print, accept and reject orders.
however, (afaik) the problem with all of these is that they use their own proprietory API so there is not any one generic solution that could be done that would work for all of them.
As this is the case, there is no way to code anything to integrate those printers into wppizza which i would be able to make available at a reasonable cost (even ignoring timeconstraints).
(though that’s not to say that one day i might have a stab at it with one of these, but that’s definitely a long way off – if ever)

that out of the way, there were also a few other requests in the past regarding “normal” sms integration but i am somewhat at a loss of what the purpose of this might be.
the only reason i can think of is to be able to reject orders, but why would you ever want to do that ?

if the reason is that something might be out of stock, then wppizza is probably not the right thing to use in the first place. the plugin expects you to list what you have available, if you do not have it, it should not be listed. if you need stockmanagement, there are plenty of other plugins that let you do that (woocommerce springs to mind). it was never in the scope of the plugin (and if ever it will not be for a long time). you could argue that this is a shortcoming of the plugin and you may well be right, but that’s just the way it is for the moment.

if the reason is that you cannot accept an order that has been placed outside your delivery area, then there is a plugin to restrict this already

if it is the case that you are worried about fake orders, then this sort of thing would not help you that much anyway and – in any case – the easiest way to get around that one is to accept upfront/cc payments only.

if you want an sms to “autoprint” an order then – again – there are better and cheaper ways (sms’ cost money) to do this (just like with alternative options regarding email2fax above)

as mentioned, i am probably missing something here so am inviting you to add to this discussion.
for the avoidance of doubt , i am not trying to sell any of the other plugins/extensions. I am only trying to get a handle on what to spend my time on that is most useful to most people as some of the above – although doable – would be a waste of time with very little benefit to very few people and/or could not be made available at a reasonable cost.

I have already spent quite a bit of time building a plugin (as yet unreleased) that as it stands is capable to send one-way sms somewhere, but am wondering if my time would be spent better elsewhere rather than making it do things noone really needs. furthermore – as with email2fax gateways – it of course involves call charges and only works with one sms gateway (tm4b.com to be precise).

just my musings on a tuesday morning

thanks for reading and any comments you may have