Fraud & pranksters. That’s why you need to create an account & pre-pay when ordering online. You can reduce fraud a few ways. One is friction: - Calling take

Fraud & pranksters. That’s why you need to create an account & pre-pay when ordering online. You can reduce fraud a few ways. One is friction: - Calling takes time. It can’t be automated. - The pizza shop can blacklist a phone number. Acquiring new ones to keep defrauding is difficult. - Creating an account and solving a captcha can be automated, but the barrier for entry is higher. - Requiring pre-payment is a big one… it costs you money! If you actually pay with your own card, it’s not really even fraud anymore. If you pay with stolen details, then you had to acquire those which is really difficult. - Emails can be blacklisted. Re-usable email domains (such as Mailinator) can be blacklisted. Creating a new email on most sites is a bit of effort. Another is traceability (make the fraudster scared): - Most countries require a real identity to be linked to phone numbers. Hence phone orders are a worthy gamble to accept without requiring a voice captcha, pre-payment, an email, etc. - Pre-payment requires a real card. If it’s yours and you do a chargeback, you can be traced. Cards can be blacklisted. If you’re using stolen details, then the store can get the police involved. The best way is detection: - Even if you can automate phone calls, the employees taking the orders would notice patterns eventually, even in the short conversations where you give only first name, number, and the order. People are really good at detecting patterns (though it might take a few successful fraud attempts before they become aware). - As accounts & emails get blacklisted, the online site can employee expensive third-party fraud detection software, which does work AFAIK. It looks at thing like data entry speed, IP addresses, order size, issuing card bank, etc. If fraud is suspected, it usually results in an additional soft barrier, such as SMS verification, rather than a hard block. This brings it back to phone numbers & their need for real identity verification — increasing friction & traceability. This should explain nearly all the things mentioned by the OP. Anything else, like needing to enter your age or whatever, can be explained by some marketing executive desperately trying to hit their KPIs.