Pizza restaurants picked online ordering the fastest. Infact, it was this category that created the need of having a robust online ordering system to not only boost sales but gain an edge you’re your competitors as well. In 2012 the major pizza brands had share of 55%of the domestic Pizza delivery market. 45% of these orders for major brands were coming in via online systems on their desktop and mobile sites.
Online Ordering for Pizza restaurants has emerged as a win-win for both the pizza restaurant and the customer. It greatly saves the labor cost and at the same time adds another revenue channel to the business.
The key drivers that favoured the growth of the online Pizza Delivery market were:
Convenience:Pizza orders have a lot of elements attached to it, like having different bases, choices of toppings, sauces etc. when a customer places an order online, it’s convenient for him to choose toppings as they appear in the box rather than remembering the toppings that the customer would like to get added on phone.
Accuracy: With so many toppings to choose from, the customers feel comfortable ordering online as they are assured of accuracy. For the restaurant too the human errors are minimized with less orders returning back to the restaurant.
Customizations: With Pizza there are huge levels of customization that the customer is looking for and a phone order is very tedious in that case. Customizations become fun when the customer is creating his own pizza online. It’s kind of a mental relation there, the customer feels he is the creator of the pizza and enjoys adding elements to it.
Offers: Today Online ordering providers like Restolabs have inbuilt coupon engines that allows Pizza restaurants to manage marketing campaigns like “Buy1Get1 Free Pizza This Friday”. The beauty is that Pizza restaurants just have to tick a Yes or No against options provided when creating a coupon and the coupon is ready in 2 Minutes.
Bulk Orders: For items like Pizza which offer high levels of customization, one is scared to place a phone order as he might screw it juggling the details of one item with the other. In such a case having an option to order online on restaurant’s website is a blessing.
Special Instructions: It has been seen that special instructions are 15% higher in case of online orders as compared to phone orders. Reason being, customers skip special instruction if they have been holding the phone for long to save their as well as restaurant’s time.
Other drivers like Loyalty or reward points too played a major role in increasing the adaptation of Online Ordering Systems by Pizza restaurants.
