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Comment by mattadams | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to bet that Pizza Pizza isn't missing out on much money over their website. It is far more common for someone to place an order for pizza by dropping by the establishment or making a two minute phone call.

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.

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Pizza Pizza received 111,111 orders through their mobile app in the past six months. [1] Dominos' gets over $1 million a week in sales. [2]

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...

IBM made a similar argument about microcomputers. "Our customers aren't interested in microcomputers. They want mainframes. We'd be better off optimizing our mainframes than investing in microcomputers."

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.

Does IBM really apply here? They seemed to do alright with the PC.

'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!

In the end, the PC market almost killed IBM. Remember, they ditched the PC during their restructuring, and have been doing much better ever since.

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.

What nearly killed IBM was (1) their devotion to their 'mainframes' and (2) Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Sun, HP, Oracle, Gateway, Dell, Cisco, Juniper, Micron, Seagate, Western Digital, EMC, AOL, etc.

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.

Pretty much everyone I know in College only order online due to it's convenience. Domino's isn't the best pizza in the world but their website is built pretty well, and as a result most pizzas you find on the college campus I am thinking of are either from the school pub or from Domino's.

I'm just waiting until they integrate Google maps or something with a GPS tracker so you can watch the pizza drive up to your door.

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.

What about when the delivery is completed by skatebord Kourier?

Yes, the two most common ways of ordering pizza now are via the phone or in person, but there's no reason to expect that this will stay constant. Communication between people has trended away from voice contact for a while now, and if a company has a working web interface to order a product, people will use it.

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.

I agree with your point that "each purchase vector should either be done right or not at all." In Pizza Pizza's case they should have stopped at an easy-to-use location finder with address and contact info and avoided the ordering bit altogether.

As someone who frequently uses the Pizza Pizza online ordering site, I couldn't disagree more. It has problems but it's way better than nothing or using the phone, which always becomes a clusterfuck because nobody can decide what they want until you're on the phone.

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

I think online pizza ordering is becoming much more popular. In my area, there is a website that allows you to order online from local shops, for a slight fee. I have seen dozens of people use this service, even though they could have called in to save the extra fee. I feel that these people would have a bad experience with Pizza Pizza, and bad experiences usually affect the perception of a product as a whole. This is where you really start to lose money.

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.

In addition, much web development suffers from the "bike shed problem"[1]: The designers, programmers, managers, and everyone else involved in creating the web site feels that they "know" what their users needs are. Nobody bothers to actually test the sites using real users.

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.

[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_shed)

I only order pizzza online...that way I can be 100% sure that they actually got my order, and that they'll make it the way I ask for.

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

Exactly. There is something nice about the lack of ambiguity. If you get a screwed up phone order, you have no idea who made the mistake. You, the rep, the store, the driver, could be anyone.

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.

Are you sure about that? I would order pizza online in a heartbeat if I didn't think that it was going to take twice as long, my order was going to get ignored, or they were going to deliver it to an address in the wrong city. If I had any confidence at all in the local pizza shop's website and the way the process orders from it, I'd never phone an order in again.

Their iPhone app is amazing though. Give it a shot, whoever built that deserves a free slice or two.

Their iphone app is usable, definitely not amazing.

Try ordering two of the same kind of dipping sauce or removing toppings from a pizza.

(I just had used it haha)

Really? It blew my mind when I used it because of how good it was. I needed to create a pizza with half-and-half toppings and it was really easy to do. Maybe not all corner cases have been handled well, but given the limited UI space and just how complex ordering pizza can be (your use case to wit), I think they did a great job.

Same here, I was floored by how good it is. I'm obviously rating it on a scale of "Apps by Canadian companies" and in that scale, it's the best without question. It's not like I'm looking for the Pizza Pizza app to have a Reeder quality level.

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.

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