By Charlie Pogacar
It’s safe to assume no company has access to more data regarding independent pizzerias than Slice, the online ordering platform dedicated to indie pizza shops. Loren Padelford, chief revenue officer with Slice, sees some disturbing patterns in that data, ones that help explain why independent pizzerias are often losing their shirt to pizza chains.
Chief among them? Thirty-five percent of indie shops have no website. The problem, Padelford submits, is that many independent operators got into the business because they have an entrepreneurial spirit and a love for pizza. But they’re wearing so many different hats that they don’t always have time to stay up on the latest technology and trends.
“If you ask them, ‘Why don’t you have a website?’ they’ll say, ‘Oh, I do have a website. I’m on Uber [Eats],'” Padelford said in a recent interview with PMQ Pizza. “And you’re like, ‘Oh, no. You know you don’t own Uber, right?’”
Related: Domino’s Inks DoorDash Deal, Expands Third-Party Partnerships
Contrast this with pizza chains, who have an entire team of people crunching back-end numbers, and you begin to understand the uphill battle most independent shops are facing. Because the chains have done the math, and their digital orders are far more profitable.
“A chain has a person whose job is to optimize margin,” Padelford said. “They’re just obsessed with it, and they’re unpacking every financial structure of every order, figuring out where the order volume needs to come from to make the most amount of money. And then they tell all of their operators, ‘Get [customers] off the phones, get them out of your shop, put them on the app, put them online because that makes us more money.”
So how can indie shops match the chains’ business savvy? Padelford suggests two easy steps that independent pizzeria owners can take to better position themselves.
Get That Website
Some pizzeria owners may feel like walk-in and phone-in orders are a core part of their shop’s customer experience, making them wary of going digital. That the traditional modes of doing business are what set them apart from pizza chains. “And that may be true for a subset of their customer base,” Padelford said. “But here’s the thing: You can keep doing that with those people! But you have to give them, and others, the option of ordering online.”
If you’re reading this and own a pizzeria that has no website where a person can place an online order, don’t walk, run to the nearest person who can help you. Often, that person works for an online ordering platform, but it’s important to distinguish between an online ordering platform that will build you your very own website versus a third-party aggregator that allows you to list your business on their marketplace. This is a critical distinction: A restaurant does not own its listing on a marketplace like DoorDash, Grubhub or Uber Eats. Those companies could cease to exist tomorrow or drop you from the lineup, and your pizzeria would suddenly be left without a pivotal revenue stream. Those companies also have control over who is seeing your listing and how often they are seeing it.
And yes, Slice happens to be one of the companies that can build for a pizzeria its very own website, but Padelford insists this isn’t a shameless sales pitch—your pizzeria’s website is more important to him than Slice’s bottom line. And giving consumers the ability to order through a website that you own and control will make your pizzeria more profitable overnight, Padelford said.
“I mean this sincerely, whether you do it with us or somebody else, just put up a website,” Padelford said. “Web orders [that come through your own web channels] are typically twice the size—literally 100% bigger!—than a walk-in order. And it takes zero effort. It’s literally just bigger because people click buttons. And they’re far more profitable because you don’t even have to talk to them. It’s the most obvious answer, especially because we all prefer to order this way now.”
Once the website is up and running, pizzeria operators should focus on trying to drive customers toward those channels. This can be as simple as training cashiers to promote the expanded ordering options or even offering incentives for those who order online for the first time.
“You just say, ‘Next time, I’ll make it easier for you,'” Padelford suggested. “‘Just order on our website.’ We see this all the time. What happens is the customer says, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you had one. Maybe I will order on your website.’ Immediately, your orders will get 100% bigger, and you’ll start seeing more profit.”
Perfect Your Google Listing
Another online mistake Padelford sees independent shops making: underestimating how pivotal a “Google My Business” can be. As frustrating as Google’s dominance of the market can be, it’s still a reality all restaurants must reckon with. A huge portion of consumers find pizzerias by Googling the search term “pizza near me” or something similar. Google is more likely to steer customers toward pizzerias with strong listings on “Google My Business.”
“It’s still the way people find you,” Padelford said. “Google owns that entire process, but they let you do it. So all you have to do is make sure your name is correct, your hours are correct, and that the website link is being steered to the right page. And if you don’t know how to do that, Google will help you do it.”
Got that? Name. Hours. Website link.
For those looking to take it to the next level, a brief business description can help customers get a feel for your shop—and perhaps make them more likely to review your pizzeria once they’ve eaten there. Here’s an example for Toro’s Pizzeria in Durham, North Carolina. It’s short, concise and tells the customer what to expect:
“Buzzing, modern pizza parlor featuring wood-fired pies & a bar, plus an assortment of Italian wines.”
Why is this so crucial? Because, again, chains have fomented an all-out assault on consumer behavior. This begins at the brick-and-mortar level, Padelford said.
“There is an active campaign from the top chains to put locations right next to [independent pizzerias],” Padelford said. “This is not by accident. It’s because they’re just going to bleed the Google list and take all of the customers. Because when someone searches ‘pizza near me’ and they find, say, Johnny’s Pizza and Papa Johns, guess which one’s going to get the order? It ain’t Johnny’s, because Johnny’s hours are going to be wrong, his website will be wrong, and Papa Johns will be doing it correctly.”
PMQ Pizza had one more question for Padelford. What would he say to the indie shops out there that don’t believe they’re competing with pizza chains? After all, many indie shop operators feel their customer demographic has a refined palette and would never stoop to ordering from Domino’s.
“I’ll agree with them,” Padelford said. “You’re not competing with the chains. You’re competing with the consumer’s eyeballs. Consumers are lazy. We’ve been taught to be lazy. For literally 20 years, Google and the big brands have taught us how to act on the internet so we just blindly do it. And so if you’re going to make [ordering] hard, a lot of them just aren’t going to do it. They’re going to say, ‘I’m out.’ This isn’t an opinion. This is just data. You can watch what happens when your website takes more than half a second to load. You start to lose that customer.”
