Email to Fax Solution
I am looking for an email to fax solution. We set up online ordering for retail – once the consumer submits the order we want the order to print out on the store’s fax machine. We would be looking at setting up 500 stores and on average they would be getting 250 orders per month online. We are currently using [redacted] to do this, but it seems to be fairly expensive. Wondering if you have any thoughts to help with our needs.
You probably have a database of the stores’ fax numbers, which means you should be able to set up this system with any fax service that does email to fax. It would work like this: your system would send an email with the order to the fax service (212-555-1212@thefaxservice.com, for example), and that order will magically be turned into a fax that comes through the store’s machine.
There are options to create a setup like this, though your best bet is probably MetroFax.com. The cost would be three cents per page, and you should be able to fit an order onto a single page, making this a pretty reasonable cost.
Of course, nothing is easy, so I do envision a few problems with this setup. First of all, you have to find a way around the issue of your stores being closed, particularly if there’s no way for the customer to know about the closing. If the shop closes down for a wedding for the weekend, a customer’s order could just sit in the fax machine for days, and the customer would (obviously) never get his/her order. You could also run into a problem if the fax line at the store is busy. Your fax service will try to send the fax several times, but if the line remains off the hook, you’ll get an email back telling you the fax failed. The problem is, you’ll have to find a way to get your system to process that email and then notify the customer that his/her order isn’t coming after all. That could a little tricky.
Good luck!
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