Poorly Designed, Broken Websites Are Costing Canadian Corporations Millions
factore.ca
factore.ca
What's worst is that if you bring it up, more often than not, you get a response like: "We don't get much business from the web anyway".
Duh!
I always get that session expired issue when ordering from Pizza Pizza online during busy times using a WebKit browser. If I use something besides Safari or Chrome, I don't have any issues.
Also, the number one reason I get when I ask others why they use the phone over the Pizza Pizza site? The site sucks. Not "it's inconvenient" or "I love explaining to an uninterested rep the exact specs of my order" but, "It sucks". Keep that in mind when insisting that nobody wants to use it with no evidence.
Despite the entire team supporting an accelerated timeframe of three months, the SVP decided our customers weren't "ready" for the changes. Within six weeks almost the entire team had left, including myself. That company is still going and they ended up doing that plan in a little over two years. They have had several new web designs in the last decade, but all seem rather dated, broken and basic.
What is more likely is that the majority of their customers really don't care about the website and so Pizza Pizza has little incentive to improve it. Why spend time and money on something that virtually no-one uses?
You're an exception to the rule. Businesses aren't as stupid as you think: they're simply putting their resources elsewhere. Online accessibility is not a priority for many businesses and the poor execution that follows should not be mistaken for anything else.
Some advantages of ordering pizza online through a proper interface: - No chance of orders being misinterpreted on the order side - Ability to see all of the options that you can order - No need to reenter delivery information
Each purchase vector should either be done right or not at all. Having poor implementations will just lower the opinion of your consumers and can discourage them from using your company at all in the future.
Try ordering two of the same kind of dipping sauce or removing toppings from a pizza.
(I just had used it haha)
I've reported bugs, submitted reviews, and recommended it to others. That's the benefit of doing it properly. I sure as hell haven't recommended or supported the terrible, half assed apps other Canadian retailers have on the app store.
Online ordering accounts for millions and millions in revenue for pizza shops alone. Anecdotally, I know several pizza shops that get more than 1/3rd of their orders from the web now.
1: http://www.pizzamarketplace.com/article/187570/Pizza-Pizza-s...
2: http://www.pizzamarketplace.com/article/184814/Domino-s-iPho...
That's the nature of the innovator's dilemma. If you listen to your existing customers, you lose out on the ability to win a nascent, but growing market that ends up being bigger than the market you're in right now.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the next decade or so another pizza chain came along with a better website and ended up with a more dominant marketshare than Pizza Pizza. As more and more people get ubiquitous internet access, the competitive advantage of having a web-based order form will grow.
'web interface' is not the first or second thing I think about when ordering pizza. Here is what I care about:
1) Taste 2) Time to door 3) Price
Everything else has little or no impact. Now if I could say 'Siri, order me my usual' and siri ordered my usual from the closest Pizza Pizza and had it delivered to my determined location? Gold!
I don't think the point is "web interface", it's basic points about access and usability. I agree that the taste of the pizza is paramount, but as companies like Amazon have discovered, even a slow website, or a challenging ecommerce transaction will turn off many potential customers.
In particular in three years near 1994 they went from just over 400,000 employees down to just over 200,000 and lost $16 billion. Their Research Division went from 4500 full time employees down to 1000 plus about 500 'contract' employees. They thoroughly cleaned out rush hour traffic in NY counties Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess. There were suicides.
Why? One of their deepest analyses was "God ceased to smile on IBM". The truth was that IBM had their head in the sand, and Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Mike Dell, etc. ate IBM's breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime snack and took their house, car, shoes, suits, ties, and shirts.
In 1984, IBM had everything in computing -- X-ray lithography, microelectronics, circuit design, microcode, computer architecture, virtual machines, mass storage, various operating systems, middleware, programming languages, productivity software, system management software, packet switched networks, marketing, and customer support, in the US and around the world. Nine years later they were nearly bust. One of the biggest extractions of defeat from the jaws of victory in all of business history. Main reason: Head in the sand. Actually, internally from various sources, both internal and external, they were always just awash in accurate and deep analyses of just what was going on. It's just that the top management had their heads in the sand. Dumb.
The exception to this rule is sites that are the only way to purchase something. These sites have a monetary incentive to make their customers successful.
They already do pretty much all the rest, telling you that whoever just put your pizza into the oven, or that they just left with your pizza.
That may be true now, but Domino's order page is pretty entertaining, and it's my favorite way to order. http://express.dominos.com/order/olo.jsp
Sure if you are only getting a single peperoni pizza you can just call it in, but if you want anything custom or are making a large order, going online is the way to go
For other businesses, I always need to make sure that they a) have good reviews and b) have a decent online presence that shows they are competent
When you order online, you know exactly what you need to know because you are both the customer and the rep, and you get an e-mail copy to reference. Errors in the order become indisputable, which is nice.
Making the age old question "Did he forget to bring that or did I forget to order it?" obsolete is reason enough to use it in my book. There are other benefits, but that's one of the best.
Also, this article is using Pizza Pizza as an example. If a large chain is failing so miserably, I am sure other companies are hurting badly from poor web development.