14 ms·
On-Line Pizza Idea Is Clever but Only Half-Baked (1994)
- chadlavi 7y agoReally makes you feel humble about anything you might say about emerging tech today.
- jsight 7y agoOr the opposite of that, since so much of what was said in the article is basically true. Ordering pizza via the internet wasn't a big deal. Getting the customizations across correctly, OTOH, made a huge difference, and every pizza ordering site now uses interactive ordering processes similar to what the author described.
- jdnenej 7y agoAnd yet I still end up just calling the pizza place by phone since it's easier than navigating a slow and awkward UI and having to enter my payment details rather than paying on pickup.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 7y agoWhere I live I stick to using one of the two dominant platforms for ordering food. The UI is half-decent, but more imporantly, it's the same no matter which restaurant you source the order from. That's a relief compared to the garbage individual pizza places put on-line.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoDoes it remember your payment details? That would make it a win all by itself.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAFAIK it can, though I don't use it - I don't trust these sites that much. Web flow of paying with my bank account is fast enough, and with recent popularization of a mobile payment system, the flow can be as fast as pulling out my phone, PIN-authing to my bank app, typing a six digit number shown on my phone into a web form, and confirming the purchase on the phone. Takes 30 seconds.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoI'm glad there's a safe way to do it. But that honestly does sound pretty complicated...
- TeMPOraL 7y agoPerhaps the fault of my description. It is really simple. They payment process with BLIK (the mobile payments system) boils down to: select you want to pay with BLIK on the merchant's site[0], type a six digit number into a box, press OK, press OK on the phone. An extra speed bump is involved with knowing what number to type - it's a randomly-generated token with 3-minute expiry time; to get it, you need to login to your bank's app. All the apps I use (perhaps all of them in Poland) offer a simplified login flow here anyway; for me, it's "click the bank icon, click BLIK, type 4 digit PIN, see the six-digit token". It really is fast and easy[2] enough that it's become my default payment method in Poland, but honestly, prior to that, I kept going through the slightly more involved flow described in [0]. I really don't like giving my card details out, especially that at least three large e-commerce sites I did give those details to can pull money out of my account with zero confirmation or notice beyond me clicking the "buy!" button on the site, so I assume a criminal with access to that data could do it too (and it's a debit card, so I can't exactly do a chargeback). -- [0] - Or with one of the intermediaries[1] that you know handles it, which without mobile payments I'd be using anyway. The intermediary lets you turn what would be "give your card details to the merchant/payment processor" flow into "login to your bank directly through your bank's login page to just authorize a transfer request from one of your accounts" one. The nice thing about it is that a) it's faster (I remember my bank credentials, not my card number), b) the whole is is PUSH, not PULL - I send them money, c) it's not tied to a card; I can pay from cardless accounts, and d) the merchant doesn't get my card number or account details. The UI flow is simple too, there's a string of redirects and prefills that make a payment with the intermediary just a few clicks, a login, and some 2FA thrown in the middle. [1] - Like these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayU. [2] - And safe! When you can get improvement on all three of the trade-off triangle, it only shows how much the older system sucks.
- zaroth 7y agoApple Pay is what changes this equation. It has your payment details and address already queued up. So you can click the size, click the topping, tap order and you’re done. It can literally be a 10 second exercise, as fast as looming up the number and dialing. Why they don’t all have Apple Pay as an option, I do not know. More to the point, that the web didn’t standardize UIs for payment and address information is probably a $100 billion mistake at least - in terms of what it costs everyone to do it their own way, and in lost time in having to constantly fill in the same form again and again.
- jsight 7y agoIf you are just ordering a simple pepperoni or cheese or something that probably is easier. The payment part can generally be solved by just telling it "cash", though. Noone complains if you actually pay with a card at the store.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- elicash 7y agoMake sure you read the article not just the headline - this person actually NAILED it (not ironically): > Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why not let them design it as well? Instead of showing an ordinary menu with a list of toppings, show a picture of a pizza with the toppings clustered on the side. Let teen-agers and college students build their own pizzas on-screen. Present a palette of toppings and let people place their mushrooms and green peppers and pepperoni anywhere on the pizza they want. The real pizza is customized accordingly. In other words, computer-aided pizza engineering. > This is precisely the sort of interactivity that computers and networks are good at. > [...] > Of course, this network designability concept easily extends to bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolates, fruit baskets and the $6.85-billion annual market in mail-order clothes shopping. It would be perfect for all kinds of gift giving.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sct202 7y agoIt's funny they mentioned flowers, when today most online flower delivery services deliver bouquets that are often don't even look inspired by or related to the picture they put online.
- GrumpyNl 7y agoYou mean like the hamburger shown at the menu and the hamburger you get for real.
- reaperducer 7y agoThis is true. It's gotten so bad that I don't order flowers online anymore. I can't count the number of times I've ordered flowers online and the bouquet showed up frozen, freezer burned, or dead in a FedEx tube mailed from the other side of the country. Now I phone (yes, phone) the local hospital near the recipient and ask them what florist they use (often it's contracted to a mom-and-pop store down the street). Then I call (yes, call) that place on the phone and order. I've never been disappointed this way.
- hprotagonist 7y agoSorry, none pizza left beef is not in uncle enzo's three ring binder. La cosa nostra pizza regrets the inconvenience, but your order cannot be completed at this time.
- bovermyer 7y agoThis article was already talked about six days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21320814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21320814
- ChikkaChiChi 7y agoThe link was even showing as visited. I kept refreshing my browser because I thought my cache was stuck!
- franze 7y agoJust ordered Deliveroo. Currently they are still a marketplace, but I wonder when they will go full "Amazon Basics"? They know what people want when, what prices they want to pay, what quality they expect, how long they are ready to wait. with all this data its just a matter of time they offer they own kitchens that create 20% of the products that fullfil 80% of the market need for 60% of the market price. wonder why no delivery company has done this yet?
- esotericn 7y agoThey already do have a portion of the business that does that. I worked for them for a few weeks in London as a way to get paid to work out. There was a sort of container warehouse in Battersea - basically food trucks that you're ordering from. You might also appreciate this: > I Sold Microwave Meals On Deliveroo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k47u9tduwb8
- franze 7y agodo they market it / present it that way on their website?
- esotericn 7y agoI don't think I've ever actually ordered from them, I'm not in the market for 20 quid takeaways. When I had a look a few years back basically everywhere looked the same with stock professional photos. You wouldn't know that your fancy-looking Indian came from a grimy backstreet shop or container or whatever else.
- heavenlyblue 7y agoThat’s why you should order from places you have actually been to. I wouldn’t say the service is any different then. But again, you say you’re not in the market for 20 quid takeaways - then how much are you willing to pay for food? That’s how much it costs to eat in London unless you’re going for cheapish fried chicken or a really bad pizza.
- bernierocks 7y agoI remember buying a digital tablet of sorts at that time..I can't remember the name of it. It was a startup that sold them as a glorified web browser (and eventually went out of business because many hobbyists did just that and got rid of all the advertisements), but there was a way to root it and install Linux. This device had the ability to order pizzas through Pizza Hut. I tried it once and it worked pretty well.
- improv32 7y agoPerhaps you're thinking of the i-Opener? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Opener
- dfukuba 7y agoSome are including games and entertainment with their pizza buying experience ;) https://garfieldeats.com/ https://garfieldeats.com/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 7y agoI find what I like most about ordering pizza online is that you are looking at a menu that calculates the cost and lets you put together the order. Then instead of having to then call someone up and read it out to them, you click ORDER and you are done. The bad bit about using DOMINOS website is the shitty popups and 'you want this?' 'you want that?' yum-cha style experience that wastes a lot of time.
- mNovak 7y agoI like being able to google for coupon codes. Trial and error doesn't go over so well on the phone.
- cbanek 7y agoNow I'm wondering if the people that did the pizza ordering scene in _The Net_ read this article. It does the same thing with the pizza design and showing the toppings. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CnWs8jDbXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CnWs8jDbXo
- Jedd 7y agoThe year before, I think just after we'd seen Mosaic / glimpsed the future, a colleague had observed that 'one day soon you won't have to hang up to order pizza'. (Most of us were on dial-up back then.) Not flying-car level of techno-prophecy, but prescient in a way I didn't immediately pick up -- ADSL / cable improved our speed, but the significantly larger impact was from having always-on Internet access.
- Razengan 7y agoWhen you see online written with a hyphen you know it's from the 90s.
- acheron 7y agoSierra was called “On-Line Systems” in 1979, and “Sierra On-Line”, with the hyphen, starting in 1982. Definitely not a 90s thing.
- Razengan 7y agoYes, I should have said 90s or earlier.
- alienallys 7y agoInternet-interface-system -- took me little to figure out they are trying to say browser
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/JMFbi http://archive.is/JMFbi
- bashinator 7y agoI'd feel remiss in not mentioning that Hashicorp's Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool has a provider for Domino's Pizza https://ndmckinley.github.io/terraform-provider-dominos/ https://ndmckinley.github.io/terraform-provider-dominos/
- tedmiston 7y agoThis one's going to require some serious QA testing.
- jammygit 7y agoDoes anybody else still get 30 minute delivery guarantees? I haven’t seen one of those in 10 years
- ripdog 7y agoAs I understand it, they were pulled because employees would drive in a very unsafe manner in order to meet the guarantee and not get penalized/chewed out by their boss. I think somebody died...?
- berbec 7y agoYes. There was a lawsuit after a fatality. The delivery driver was a witness against Domino's. They now have a satisfaction guarantee. If you call and say it was too slow, you'll be calmly told they don't offer a time guarantee, but if you were, for example, dissatisfied with your oder, you get free pizza.
- elif 7y agoIt is as good as a guarantee in Tokyo and Osaka. Unless you pick somewhere 10+ minutes away by bicycle, motorcycle and car. The restaurant leg is typically sub-10 minutes.
- hunter2_ 7y agoWe hyphenated "teen-agers" back then? It's well known that hyphenations tend to be temporary, but that one is news to me.
- contingencies 7y agoAwesome UX for pizza ordering in Tomsk, Siberia http://www.маминапицца.рф/ http://www.xn--80aaa4abubjt5ea.xn--p1ai/
- newman8r 7y agoBeing able to order a pizza via a new technology is a humorous benchmark. Reminds me of the first pizza ordered with bitcoin. The next big one might be the first person to order a pizza with a brain implant.
- elif 7y agoAfter thinking we were in the golden era of food delivery, getting food in 45-60 minutes, I was recently blown away. In major cities like Tokyo and Osaka, I had food in my hands in as little as 18 minutes after pressing "order" with an average around 25 minutes. The software (ubereats) is the same, the difference is in restaurant efficiency and cultural norms.
- mlang23 7y agoThis would have been inherently inaccessible to people with visual disabilities. Besides: 5 years later, I ordered the first pizza in my hometown. It never arrived. Gotta love the new trends of the Internet.
- johnpowell 7y agoI graduated high school in 1996. I really wanted a computer. This was around the time where there were Power Computing clones that were licensed from Apple. But my buddy just started college at the University of Oregon. They had a computing center that was this tiny little store that was on the second floor above all the big rack-mounted computers. I thought it was beautiful. I still love seeing walls of servers. But Apple used to give massive discounts to University students. I was not one, but my friend was. So I gave him $1,400 in cash for a Performa 6214, a Apple Multiple Scan 14 Display, and a StyleWriter 1200. It was around a 50% discount for being a student at the university. I spent two months gutting and rebuilding my friends parents RV for the money. I hate cryptocurrencies.. For some meandering reason my point is this. Computers were expensive in 1996. Some internet providers still charged by the hour.. I got a 14.4 connection using my friends dial-up info from the university. I paid 200 dollars for my modem. So the barrier to entry to the internet was steep back then. So ordering pizza was a novelty. Computers were wildly expensive, internet was by the hour, and slow. So might as well just pick up the phone and be done with it in two minutes. Back to Bitcoin.. Don't say it is just like the internet. The internet was hard in 1996. I can drop a five on Coinbase and get Bitcoin, but I don't want to because it is stupid.
- merpnderp 7y agoI wonder what the internet would look like if people still had the since of awe, wonder, and appreciation of what exactly is going on when we connect to the internet. I can remember being a small child, 6 or 7, and connecting to the internet in the 80's and joining a chat room full of adults who were professionals, talking about the problems of doctors, engineers and financiers. It was absolutely amazing and I couldn't get enough. And then I blew through my 30 minute allowance the first month and my parents cancelled "the internet" after a $500+ phone bill.
- AptSeagull 7y ago>"Fundamentally, there’s not much difference between ordering a pizza over the phone and ordering one on-line. " Except for dealing with people, friction is constant
- kbos87 7y agoJudging by the performance of Grubhub’s stock today, this headline was spot on, and seeing it here on HN is utterly ironic :)