Frank Pepe's Pizzeria
If you went to school at Yale, or grew up in Connecticut in general, Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria is baked into your personality. It’s a part of you. This regional cult favorite has built its icon status on coal fired pizzas that are completely cravable. While ordering your favorite pie is pretty easy in person, doing it online was challenging.
Frank Pepe’s, or “Pepe’s” for short, embarked on a digital experience transformation to remedy the challenges their beloved fan base experienced while attempting to order online. Having identified and integrated Olo as a partner, Pepe’s was ready to revamp the user experience to realize a better look and feel, but the Rapturous team had a better plan for the budget.
TL;DR
Refocused budget investment on full Olo integration instead of aesthetic refresh to realize a fully seamless digital customer experience.
Integrated Olo into the website experience with custom front-end thereby removing the bifurcated .com and orders website relationship.
Designed and developed a custom order and checkout flow based on user testing and UX principles.
Fully response and ADA compliant, the newly revamped site produced immediate measurable results across same store sales.
Created features to naturally drive loyalty signups and adoption.
Pizza Restaurant Website Strategy
The strategy for Pepe’s Pizzeria’s new website experience was simple: Create a seamless, frictionless user experience that would increase conversions and repeat traffic. Secondarily, the brand needed to move the needle on loyalty signups and increase first party ordering. A full Olo and Punchh integration was the obvious path to realize those goals.
Starting with user experience strategy and design, we identified areas of opportunity for optimizing the home page, the site’s most frequently visited page, to maximize pull through. By highlighting the most popular items above the break on that page, getting patrons into an order quickly became more likely.
Another area of friction is how Patrons answer the two most critical questions in ordering from restaurants: How do you want to receive the food and where do you receive it? Frequently, Patrons are forced to answer these questions before adding items to the cart. This creates a large barrier and reduces the opportunities to capitalize on impulse purchases.
To compound the challenge, a lot of times Patrons are required to answer questions frivolously as in the case of having to enter a home address when ordering pickup. A better path to setting these parameters had to be created.
Team Rapturous focused on simplifying these systems while reducing the chances for miscommunications and errors. This focus drove a fresh approach to the UX that in turn empowered design to create a natural flow with the user interface.
Restaurant Online Ordering Optimization
With the User Experience (UX) defined, the team turned their attention to creating an on-brand experience with features that optimized and accentuated the overall experience. From stronger photography edits that honestly showcased the enticing food to upsells that helped increase check averages, Pepe’s website helped immerse and engage Patrons.
One area of complication specific to the pizza restaurant industry is the heavy customization required in a build your own approach. The team solved this need mobile first to make it easy to build and edit pizzas with toppings applied to whole or halves, and a real time price calculation that didn’t impede on the building task.
Coupled with beautiful imagery of the toppings, the build your own pizza feature streamlined an otherwise clunky process. With an easier to use feature, more orders could flow through.
Upsells in the order summary were another major opportunity to elate guests and increase check averages. Using an upsell engine, we created a simple, but powerful way of suggesting desserts and other complementary items.
