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I work for a POS company and yeah, it's crazy how much more complex something like this is than you think at first. Another wrinkle that wasn't covered in this

I work for a POS company and yeah, it's crazy how much more complex something like this is than you think at first. Another wrinkle that wasn't covered in this post: variable pricing. What I mean by that can best be explained with this example: You have a S/M/L pizza but the additional toppings are priced differently for the S vs M vs L ($0.50, $1, $2). But you probably want a "Toppings" option set with choices like "Sausage, Tomatoes, etc" that's reusable across all your pizzas (for stock/reporting purposes). Also you want to be able to mark a topping as out of stock and have it apply to all your pizzas. So how do you handle the price differences? Remember this 1 option (Size) modifying the pricing for a totally different option (Toppings). Also you might want to set this on a per-pizza basis, since you also need to modify the "Toppings" option to include "Beef, Sausage, and Pepperoni" for free on the "Meat Lovers" and you also need to have some kind of handling for "2-Topping pizza" where you get 2 toppings for free then have to pay for any extras. Another fun concepts is bundles. Maybe you want to offer a pizza+2-Liter or 2 2-Toppings pizza deal. All of it gets extremely complicated very quickly. Even more fun is finding a way to translate your internal menu structure into something DoorDash/etc can understand and let me tell you, it will /not/ be a 1-to-1 mapping. Sure, for something like variable pricing you could just say "screw it" and make all additional toppings $2/each (let's pretend that's what they cost on the Large) that way you are always doing as good or better than your normal POS or you could "flatten" all your menu items so you end up shipping "Small Pizza", "Medium Pizza", etc over to DoorDash (Don't forget, you have to do that for every pizza then unflatten it on the way back into your system). Don't get me started on how DoorDash does testing, they literally use their live site for testing. There is a town in Alaska where they add your demo location to and they give you a login with a card on file that they just refund at the end of the day or something like that. It's super janky.

nickjj 3y ago
That's a good point about the toppings being different, especially on different types of pies or slices. For example on their personal pizza, there isn't an option for half toppings, it's full or nothing. We do have bundles, such as multiple lunch or dinner combos. They are a distinct menu item in the POS system as "Dinner combo 1" with a description of what's included. What was really fun was helping design a printed menu where we wanted to display 25 different pies in S / M / L variants as well as having gluten free options for most of them. We opted for a 3 column price layout for the 3 sizes and put gluten free in its own little section with a different way to associate the prices to at least 20 different pies since the size and price was the same for all gluten free options. It was a good lesson in dealing with "actual constraints". Especially when the font size couldn't be reduced and we couldn't use more than 1.2 pages for listing all of the pies.

nickjj 3y ago

That's a good point about the toppings being different, especially on different types of pies or slices. For example on their personal pizza, there isn't an option for half toppings, it's full or nothing. We do have bundles, such as multiple lunch or dinner combos. They are a distinct menu item in the POS system as "Dinner combo 1" with a description of what's included. What was really fun was helping design a printed menu where we wanted to display 25 different pies in S / M / L variants as well as having gluten free options for most of them. We opted for a 3 column price layout for the 3 sizes and put gluten free in its own little section with a different way to associate the prices to at least 20 different pies since the size and price was the same for all gluten free options. It was a good lesson in dealing with "actual constraints". Especially when the font size couldn't be reduced and we couldn't use more than 1.2 pages for listing all of the pies.