‘Can I get a side…?’

Among the most popular and significant developments in the pizza industry over the last 15 years in my opinion is online sales. By now, if you’re not offering an online ordering option, stop reading, call your point-of-sale company and add it right now — you’re missing the boat!

In all seriousness, I can remember working a late night with one of the big chains back in the early 2000s, and suddenly, the make line screen started beeping really loud and an order appeared. In my experience, that was the very start of online ordering. Over the years, as smartphones proliferated, not only did the big chains adopt online sales, but nearly every point-of-sales system and pizzerias, big and small, added it as option.

The advantages were really endless — in particular, with customers ordering from their smartphones, it gets employees off ringing phones and saves on labor. It even leads to higher ticket average, as customers frequently get trigger happy because of the ease of adding to their carts with a simple finger tap. There’s even the psychological element, as a nice visual menu leads to ordering extra items for the family. But the real science of adding to ticket averages on online sales comes through what I like to call “add-ons.”

All about add-ons

Add-ons are any opportunity to add extra sales online by having strategically placed prompts and buttons added to the back end of your online platform. For example, say a customer orders
10 wings that come with ranch. Is there a button to add more ranch, or do they have to ask for more ranch packets in a comments section? Customers should be able to address any combination of menu items or special request with a button tap when they are placing the order, rather than leaving the only
option to be a written-out (and possibly misconstrued) comment. Taking things one step further, you may want to think about including a pop-up window that opens when they select wings, asking the customer if they would you like to add extra ranch, carrots or celery. You get the idea — take advantage of online sales systems by making it easier for customers to add on to their order.

The same example can be applied to a pizza order. Have you had the customer that wants to take black olives off of a supreme pizza and add double cheese or another high-end topping in their place? If you leave a comment box on the online menu, that gives them the green light to do just that, but a menu that pops up on every pizza order makes it far easier and enticing. There is also an opportunity for extra sales by nudging customers via a pop-up menu that asks if they would like to up the size of their pizza (for a couple of bucks, of course). All of these subtle suggestions keep the ticket average higher than a normal phone call and give your customer more of what they didn’t even know they needed.

Even when the online order is wrapped up and in the cart, the add-ons aren’t finished. This is a great time to add on an appetizer. You can get creative and set up the point-of-sales platform so that at this point it offers a menu item at a small discount, or you can combine the appetizer with a 2-liter soda as a clincher. And whatever you do, don’t forget to include a pop-up asking if they would like to satisfy their sweet tooth with a dessert item.

None of this is really rocket science. As I mentioned, the big guys have been using online ordering for the better part of two decades. They’ve perfected it, so if you really want to see these tactics in action, just order a pizza (or at least put it in your cart) from one of the “Big Three” in your area.

Implementing your strategy

The online functions of point-of-sale systems have grown by leaps and bounds and truly give you an opportunity to increase your online ticket average during a time of so much uncertainty. If you’re new to online sales or have never implemented an add-on strategy, reach out to the vendor or employee who handles your online sales platform. Ask them, “can you do this?” You might be surprised, and it will probably leave you wondering why they didn’t tell you about this sooner. Probably because you never asked.

That brings me to my final point: Stop thinking “well, this is how we’ve always done it” and grab some of those easy low hanging sales. We tend to think that things in the online realm are high-tech and can only be done by the big guys — but everything today is accessible and scalable to businesses of any size. Think about it: There was a time when simply having a system with touchscreens was the big, shiny, seemingly unobtainable new thing, and now, if you don’t have a point-of-sale system that has the latest features and is pushing out monthly upgrades, you have the wrong system.

As it is with online sales, pop-up menus and the constant mission to increase your ticket average, the more you add-on, the better.

NICK BOGACZ  is the founder and president of Caliente Pizza & Draft House in Pittsburgh. Instagram: @caliente_pizza