You've Got Pepperoni - Company Business and Marketing

Industry Standard, The, August 7, 2000 by Michael Menduno

There's nothing a pizzeria worker hates more than asking a college kid over the phone: What do you want on your pizza? "It's the toughest question in the world," says Ramon DeLeon, operations manager of a Domino's Pizza franchise in Chicago. The customer invariably muffles the phone and shouts to his buddies, "Whaddya want?!" But the Internet is coming to the rescue, says Deleon.

Local universities, resistant to outside food vendors, now have to fend off the attack of the online "brainfood campaign" that DeLeon's franchise, which counts five stores, launched during spring finals. Stressed-out students can now order their pies online. DeLeon claims the campaign has boosted sales 32 percent, and he expects Web orders to contribute up to 10 percent of business at his stores by the end of the year: "It's like MP3. The kids have gone nuts over it."

Though most national pizza chains provide customers with store locators on their Web sites, Domino's is the first in the $32 billion industry to take orders online.

The service is sup-lied by Chicago's QuikOrder, which has signed 400 Domino's stores and expects to have 1,000 online by National Pizza Month, also known as October.

QuikOrder sits in the middle of each transaction. Reading a customer's ZIP code, it transfers each order to the nearest Franchise's point-of-sale system. The system then calculates the estimated time-of-arrival based on the store's last 10 orders and notifies the customer by e-mail. But best of all is that people can see the menu before they order, making the average online order 20 percent to 40 percent higher than offline orders.