Website Review and Rate: Dominos.com
Jun 23rd, 2008 by Rich Page
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Being a pizza lover and an internet lover, I usually ordered pizza online through papajohns.com, who have a rather ordinary website, but I love their pizza. After it took an hour to get to me using papajohns.com recently, I thought I would give one of the other big chains a try. So, thought I would give dominos.com a try. And boy was I surprised with the whole experience! So much so that I thought it would be the perfect candidate for the next in my website review and rate series…
Look and Feel - 8/10
The good: As soon as you visit dominos.com, you are presented with modern-looking stylish website, one that matches Domino’s regular branding. And a big picture of a tasty Dominos pizza, even though it doesn’t actually tell you what the pizza is. Some nice button rollovers too.
The bad: There is surprisingly little usage of flash and no videos on dominos.com, which was a little surprising, given their trendy image. A nice flash intro area on the homepage would have been nice for example.
Intuitiveness and Usability - 7/10
The good: Its a fairly simple site to use, with simple, logical navigation items, like ‘order’, ‘menu’, ‘locations’ and ‘tracker’, so it gets bonus points there, as its essential for users to be able to easily find ‘where’ to order their pizza on this website, and to find the menu.
The bad: I wasn’t too impressed with the ‘menu’ page though and how it worked though. Its not obvious where the list of actual pizzas are. It just shows you the pizza bases, and when you click on one it starts the order process, which was unexpected - I wasn’t ready to order yet! To actually find the pizza menu, you have to click on ‘feasts’, which appears in the sub navigation at the top, (next to ‘pizzas’ which would have been the more obvious choice). Not only was this not very prominent, but how was I supposed to know what ‘feasts’ meant? Sounds more like a page that would list combo deals to me, not the actual specialty pizzas. Also, the website doesn’t really explain what the ‘you got 30 minutes’ promotion is about. Does it mean you get your pizza in 30 minutes? Or they make your pizza in 30 minutes? An explanation would have been nice.
Sticky/ Web 2.0 Content - 7.5/10
The good: One of things that I was most impressed with at dominos.com was their great pizza tracker. This appears once you have completed your order, 
and gives you an auto-updated real time status of what is happending with your pizza, like ‘Joe just put your pizza in the oven at 7.32pm’. This really made you feel part of the online pizza ordering process, and gets you excited when it hits the final stage of ‘pizza on route to be delivered’. This was much better than the other online pizza ordering systems like papajohns, where you just get a email estimate of delivery. Boring.
The bad: An online community at dominos.com for pizza lovers seems to be strangely lacking. You get an account when you login, so why not build on that, and have a profile? And why not be able to meet other pizza lovers online, rate and review pizzas, and share pizza creations? Seems like a prime candidate to build in some web 2.0 and online community features. In terms of the great pizza tracker page, it seems like it would have been a great place to put a ‘recommend a friend’ link, especially how likely I would have been at that point to recommend them (I was very impressed!).
Overall Rating - 7.5/10
As an online pizza ordering experience, I would have given this higher (like a 9), particularly for the pizza tracker idea, but the rest of the website could be improved and bettered further still. And as I mentioned, surely dominos.com should try and build an online pizza-lovers community into dominos.com… if they don’t, I think its just a matter of time before Pizza Hut or Papa Johns does. Overall though, thumbs up Dominos, you have a much better website than your pizza rivals, particularly papajohns.com!
Analytics/Testing Ideas (non-geeks can avoid this section!)
Surprise surprise, upon looking at the source code, I see dominos.com are using Google Analytics as their analytics tool. This seems a little strange, given how highly trafficked dominos.com is, surely they would gain more insight using a more advanced tool like Site Catalyst. In terms of things to test, I would definitely make changes to their ‘menu’ page, and test making it easier to find the actual different specialty pizzas they have, and use another name to clarify what ‘feasts’ are. This would surely decrease the abandoment rate from the ordering process (that it puts you in without you expecting). In terms of their ordering process, I would test adding a ’steps’ status bar, so you know exactly how many steps it is going to order, and how you are progressing. This is a very common online shopping experience, and helps set expectations, and should increase help increase conversion rates (i.e. more pizzas sold!).
>>>> Well thats my review of Dominos website. Hopefully you liked it! Feel free to make your own comments about the Dominos website too, or improvements and ideas for what websites you would like to see me review in the future. Thanks!
I haven’t used the Dominos website yet. Thanks for the heads up. What are some of the reasons not to use Site Catalyst, other than the license fee?
I used Pizza Huts once, it was rough. Me personally, i like calling, call me old fashioned.
i’m most def’ checking out the site.
Thanks… nice write up, except you forgot to include the 1/10 rating for the actual product
I’m currently an employee at a Domino’s pizza store that is not yet hooked up to the online ordering system. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how the online system works, I’ve heard it’s quite seamless for both the customer an employees.
I definitely prefer ordering from a restaurant online than over the phone.