Online commerce is a fact of life for most retailers in the U.S. these days and nearly every business has a website of its’ own to allow the ordering of their products and services online. If numbers are proof, industry analysts predict revenues from online retail businesses will exceed a whopping $250 billion by the end of 2011. Among Internet retailers, restaurants have been some of the slowest businesses to adopt online practices. Pizzerias, however, are a different matter.
The business of online ordering has been a proven success in for the pizzerias that have tried it. The big pizza chain restaurants like Pizza Hut, Domino’s and Papa John’s have already embraced online ordering and now many independent pizzeria operators across the country are jumping on the bandwagon too. They are quickly learning that online ordering can help improve overall sales and increase the number and area of customers reached with their advertising. A strong online presence with ads, menus and ordering can give a smaller operator the same marketing power that the big guys enjoy.
Pizza Hut can handle Pizza Hut’s orders and Pizza Inn will handle their own orders too. The independent pizzerias that have online presence will probably be able to take care of the business that comes from their own sites as well. But what if you didn’t want to go to 13 different sites to order a pizza? What if you wanted to simply go to one Website and order your pizza from any restaurant of your choice, without restrictions on the store, price or location? Could you do it?
Now you can order just about any pizza, just about anywhere from just one Website, thanks to Pizza.com. The owner of the Website with the generic-sounding name has big plans for it, “It’s probably the best generic domain name in existence,’’ said Sean Moriarty, CEO of Pizza.com. Moriarty plans to develop Pizza.com into the most comprehensive pizza resource on the planet and online ordering is a big part of the plan.
Moriarty recognized that the big chains account for about 30% of all pizza sales in the U.S. That left 70% of the business to independent stores who each averaged about $500K in annual sales last year. Pizza’s popularity with younger customers and families, along with the delivery side of the business, indicated that online pizza ordering would probably be one of the first commercially successful applications of the new technology to enjoy widespread acceptance.
Pizza’s popularity has made it America’s favorite food and the delivery side of the business is a huge part of the success story. It is estimated 90% of the people ordering food online are ordering it for delivery. It was only natural that the technologically-savvy, younger pizza consumers would be the first to utilize online ordering, and that the rest of the pizza-consuming public would soon follow suit. The Website with the strongest direct, type-in name for Pizza on the Internet, Pizza.com, hopes to become your first stop online when you order your next pizza.
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