Pizza.com, Internet Pizza Ordering and Successful Online Marketing

It seems that every business case study or example seems to use a pizzeria as their reference company. Perhaps it is just because the old fashioned pizza restaurant is ubiquitous. Maybe it is because we all like pizza? But the reality was that it always appeared to be a “simple” business model that everyone could understand.

1. A client phones in his or her order
2. The pizzeria makes the pizza
3. The pizzeria delivers the product to the client
4. The client enjoys said product (and hopefully becomes a repeat customer)

Behind the scenes you have the sourcing of the ingredients, negotiating property leases, the marketing, etc. But the business that many people grew up with is not the business that exists today. You only have to look at the recent news that Papa John’s surpasses $1 billion in online pizza sales to realize that a significant shift is occurring in marketing and delivery [in the story, they indicate that 20% of their sales comes from online orders or from SMS text message ordering].

This story comes on the heels of another story of a few weeks ago that Pizza.com sold for $2.6 million as reported by the Washington Post [though there are some within the domain community, like Andrew over at DomainNameWire, that appear to be questioning the legitimacy of the Pizza.com sale on Sedo].

When I was at the CFA conference last week, I met up with several brand franchise owners in this space, including some of the crew over from New Orleans Pizza [I hope you expand further into BC, people say your pizza is delicious]. Another owner from a different chain joked in a session when it was mentioned that people were selling goods through Second Life, “Ya… but can you get them to buy pizza?” I said, not only would it be easy to set up a virtual pizza shop, whereby you could sell virtual pizza, you could probably tie such a store into your order center without too much complexity and allow the gamer who is sitting at his computer to order a virtual and real pizza at the same time.

[Note on the above: any franchisor who wants to pursue this, drop me a line and we’ll work out the details].

All of the above being said, I believe that the pizzeria is a good business to take advantage of the advances in local-based, paid search advertising. After all, who here reading this hasn’t looked in the Yellow Pages for “Pizza”? But for millions of people (ourselves included), we no longer have that book in the house. And as a result, when hungry, I will go online and search for “Pizza in Maple Ridge” (the results for which shows no paid search advertisers presently).

Perhaps I’ll give a call to the folks over at New Orleans Pizza to see if that can be changed (or at least get them closer to opening a franchise over here, so that they might show up if I searched).