Every marketing channel on this site ends at the same place: a customer trying to place an order. If that flow loses a third of them, every campaign is a third less effective and every acquisition cost is 50% higher than it needed to be. Conversion work on the ordering flow is the highest-leverage marketing work available, and it is usually owned by nobody.
| Step | Common failure | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Landing | Homepage instead of ordering | Send every campaign link to the ordering entry point for the right store |
| Store selection | Asked to choose from a list of twenty | Detect location; confirm rather than ask |
| Menu browse | Slow images, deep nesting, no photos | Fast, flat, photographed. Popular items first. |
| Customisation | Too many required choices | Sensible defaults, everything else optional |
| Account | Forced registration before ordering | Guest checkout, with account creation offered after |
| Address | Validator rejecting valid addresses | Test real local addresses; allow manual entry as a fallback |
| Fees | Charges appearing at the last step | Show delivery cost early. Late fees are the single biggest abandonment cause. |
| Payment | Limited methods, no wallets | Apple Pay and Google Pay materially lift mobile conversion |
Requiring an account before a first order costs conversions at a rate that surprises operators every time they test it. The customer wanted a pizza and has been handed a form.
Offer guest checkout, then create the account from the order details afterwards with a single tap: "save this for next time". You capture the identity you wanted, after the order rather than instead of it.
You do not need an account before the order. You need one after it, which is a completely different conversation.
Ordering happens on a phone, often on a mobile connection, frequently at peak when your systems are busiest. Every second of load time costs completed orders, and the cost is concentrated precisely in the peak hours where the orders are most valuable.
Test the flow on a mid-range phone on a throttled connection at 7pm on a Friday, not on office wifi at 11am on a Tuesday. The two experiences are not the same product.
Most pizza customers order roughly the same thing. A prominent one-tap reorder of their last order, visible before any menu browsing, converts at multiples of the standard flow and shortens the whole decision.
It also pairs directly with your marketing: every campaign link for a returning customer should land on a page where reordering their usual takes one tap and thirty seconds.
A single conversion rate tells you there is a problem. A step-by-step funnel tells you where. Instrument every step, segment by device and by store, and look at the peak-hour numbers separately. The failure that matters most is the one that only happens when you are busy.
Direct ordering flows commonly convert between 25% and 45% of sessions that reach the menu. What matters more than the benchmark is your own step-by-step drop-off, because that is what is actually fixable.
Almost never. The engineering and payment compliance burden is large and ongoing. Choose a platform that lets you control the landing experience, own the customer data, and export it: those three things matter far more than building it yourself.
As much as you can get, because the margin difference is 15 to 30 points. Practically, shops with strong marketing and a good ordering experience get the majority of volume direct; treating marketplaces as an acquisition channel to convert from, rather than a sales channel to depend on, is the right posture.
Keep reading
Recovering abandoned online orders: the timing, the message, whether to discount, and the diagnostic value of what people abandon.
Audience & dataPractical ways to turn anonymous tickets into identified customers (online ordering, loyalty, QR on the box, the till, and wifi) without annoying anyone.
ChannelsThe box, the bag and the receipt reach a customer at maximum goodwill for close to nothing, and they are the only channel that reaches marketplace customers.
ChannelsCapturing high-intent local pizza searches, defending your own brand name against marketplace bidding, and keeping cost per order honest.
marketing.pizza runs all of it, every night, across every store you have.