Poorly Designed, Broken Websites Are Costing Canadian Corporations Millions

http://factore.ca/on-the-floor/116-poorly-designed-canadian-corporate-websites-are-costing-them-millions

by adriand • 15 years ago

39 27 15 years ago

mattadams2• 15 years ago

I'm willing to bet that Pizza Pizza isn't missing out on much money over their website. It is far more common for someone to place an order for pizza by dropping by the establishment or making a two minute phone call.

What is more likely is that the majority of their customers really don't care about the website and so Pizza Pizza has little incentive to improve it. Why spend time and money on something that virtually no-one uses?

You're an exception to the rule. Businesses aren't as stupid as you think: they're simply putting their resources elsewhere. Online accessibility is not a priority for many businesses and the poor execution that follows should not be mistaken for anything else.

kevinh• 15 years ago

Yes, the two most common ways of ordering pizza now are via the phone or in person, but there's no reason to expect that this will stay constant. Communication between people has trended away from voice contact for a while now, and if a company has a working web interface to order a product, people will use it.

Some advantages of ordering pizza online through a proper interface: - No chance of orders being misinterpreted on the order side - Ability to see all of the options that you can order - No need to reenter delivery information

Each purchase vector should either be done right or not at all. Having poor implementations will just lower the opinion of your consumers and can discourage them from using your company at all in the future.

mattadams2• 15 years ago

I agree with your point that "each purchase vector should either be done right or not at all." In Pizza Pizza's case they should have stopped at an easy-to-use location finder with address and contact info and avoided the ordering bit altogether.

waterside812• 15 years ago

Their iPhone app is amazing though. Give it a shot, whoever built that deserves a free slice or two.

adamtmca• 15 years ago

Their iphone app is usable, definitely not amazing.

Try ordering two of the same kind of dipping sauce or removing toppings from a pizza.

(I just had used it haha)

dangrossman• 15 years ago

Pizza Pizza received 111,111 orders through their mobile app in the past six months. [1] Dominos' gets over $1 million a week in sales. [2]

Online ordering accounts for millions and millions in revenue for pizza shops alone. Anecdotally, I know several pizza shops that get more than 1/3rd of their orders from the web now.

1: http://www.pizzamarketplace.com/article/187570/Pizza-Pizza-s...

2: http://www.pizzamarketplace.com/article/184814/Domino-s-iPho...

quanticle• 15 years ago

IBM made a similar argument about microcomputers. "Our customers aren't interested in microcomputers. They want mainframes. We'd be better off optimizing our mainframes than investing in microcomputers."

That's the nature of the innovator's dilemma. If you listen to your existing customers, you lose out on the ability to win a nascent, but growing market that ends up being bigger than the market you're in right now.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the next decade or so another pizza chain came along with a better website and ended up with a more dominant marketshare than Pizza Pizza. As more and more people get ubiquitous internet access, the competitive advantage of having a web-based order form will grow.

comatose_kid• 15 years ago

Does IBM really apply here? They seemed to do alright with the PC.

'web interface' is not the first or second thing I think about when ordering pizza. Here is what I care about:

1) Taste 2) Time to door 3) Price

Everything else has little or no impact. Now if I could say 'Siri, order me my usual' and siri ordered my usual from the closest Pizza Pizza and had it delivered to my determined location? Gold!

jt2190• 15 years ago

In addition, much web development suffers from the "bike shed problem"[1]: The designers, programmers, managers, and everyone else involved in creating the web site feels that they "know" what their users needs are. Nobody bothers to actually test the sites using real users.

The exception to this rule is sites that are the only way to purchase something. These sites have a monetary incentive to make their customers successful.

[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_shed)

Fliko• 15 years ago

Pretty much everyone I know in College only order online due to it's convenience. Domino's isn't the best pizza in the world but their website is built pretty well, and as a result most pizzas you find on the college campus I am thinking of are either from the school pub or from Domino's.

Natsu• 15 years ago

I'm just waiting until they integrate Google maps or something with a GPS tracker so you can watch the pizza drive up to your door.

They already do pretty much all the rest, telling you that whoever just put your pizza into the oven, or that they just left with your pizza.

sp332• 15 years ago

That may be true now, but Domino's order page is pretty entertaining, and it's my favorite way to order. http://express.dominos.com/order/olo.jsp

CountSessine• 15 years ago

Are you sure about that? I would order pizza online in a heartbeat if I didn't think that it was going to take twice as long, my order was going to get ignored, or they were going to deliver it to an address in the wrong city. If I had any confidence at all in the local pizza shop's website and the way the process orders from it, I'd never phone an order in again.

vaksel• 15 years ago

I only order pizzza online...that way I can be 100% sure that they actually got my order, and that they'll make it the way I ask for.

Sure if you are only getting a single peperoni pizza you can just call it in, but if you want anything custom or are making a large order, going online is the way to go

For other businesses, I always need to make sure that they a) have good reviews and b) have a decent online presence that shows they are competent

shinratdr4• 15 years ago

Exactly. There is something nice about the lack of ambiguity. If you get a screwed up phone order, you have no idea who made the mistake. You, the rep, the store, the driver, could be anyone.

When you order online, you know exactly what you need to know because you are both the customer and the rep, and you get an e-mail copy to reference. Errors in the order become indisputable, which is nice.

Making the age old question "Did he forget to bring that or did I forget to order it?" obsolete is reason enough to use it in my book. There are other benefits, but that's one of the best.

Indy_Dh• 15 years ago

I think online pizza ordering is becoming much more popular. In my area, there is a website that allows you to order online from local shops, for a slight fee. I have seen dozens of people use this service, even though they could have called in to save the extra fee. I feel that these people would have a bad experience with Pizza Pizza, and bad experiences usually affect the perception of a product as a whole. This is where you really start to lose money.

Also, this article is using Pizza Pizza as an example. If a large chain is failing so miserably, I am sure other companies are hurting badly from poor web development.

algoshift• 15 years ago

The problem is widespread. Lots of businesses have horrible sites. It's what I call the "cousin web-developer syndrome".

What's worst is that if you bring it up, more often than not, you get a response like: "We don't get much business from the web anyway".

Duh!

acangiano• 15 years ago

I notified Pizza Pizza many times over the years. The few times they bothered replying they were nice about it and provided me with coupons. But they never really fixed the problems.

shinratdr4• 15 years ago

Let me guess, he used a WebKit based browser?

I always get that session expired issue when ordering from Pizza Pizza online during busy times using a WebKit browser. If I use something besides Safari or Chrome, I don't have any issues.

Also, the number one reason I get when I ask others why they use the phone over the Pizza Pizza site? The site sucks. Not "it's inconvenient" or "I love explaining to an uninterested rep the exact specs of my order" but, "It sucks". Keep that in mind when insisting that nobody wants to use it with no evidence.

devs1010• 15 years ago

I work for a software company that is owned by a parent company from Canada (but the company I work for is in the US), I can say this doesn't surprise me, management from Canada seems to place a low priority on spending to keep things modern

nekojima• 15 years ago

One of the OP comments is on how conservative Canadian companies can be. Ten years ago I worked for a major financial services firm in Toronto and was involved with the launching of their web services, which at the time was already five years late. They had a "five-year plan" for internet development, all of which then was years behind the then leading competition in the country and could have been done in three months, with no overtime, with the current staff in place and not neglecting our normal roles.

Despite the entire team supporting an accelerated timeframe of three months, the SVP decided our customers weren't "ready" for the changes. Within six weeks almost the entire team had left, including myself. That company is still going and they ended up doing that plan in a little over two years. They have had several new web designs in the last decade, but all seem rather dated, broken and basic.

Poorly Designed, Broken Websites Are Costing Canadian Corporations Millions

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