Pizzeria Online Ordering: Toppings, Sizes & Keeping Every Penny

On an aggregator your Margherita is often three separate listings — 9", 12" and 14" — with the toppings duplicated under each one. It is a mess to maintain and a chore for the customer. The better approach is a single pizza with modifier groups layered on top, so one product covers every version a customer might build.

Start with a required size choice. Make size the first thing a customer picks, and make it mandatory so no order can slip through without one. A 9" Margherita at £7.50, a 12" at £10.50 and a 14" at £13.50 — the base price of the pizza shifts with the size, and everything added afterwards prices on top of it. Because the choice is required, the kitchen never receives a ticket that just says "Margherita" with no size on it.

Add toppings as priced extras. A second modifier group lets customers add toppings — pepperoni, mushrooms, red onion, chorizo — each with its own price. Charge 95p a topping if that suits your costs, or set premium items higher (£1.50 for buffalo mozzarella, £2 for prosciutto). Every extra a customer taps is added to the running total, so the price they see at checkout already includes the lot.

Handle half-and-half and removals too. A half-and-half option lets a customer put pepperoni on one side and mushroom on the other without confusing the kitchen, and a "remove toppings" group lets them take the olives off a Fiorentina at no charge. Crust and base choices — thin, classic, stuffed edge, gluten-free — sit in their own group, with the stuffed edge or gluten-free base carrying a surcharge if you need it.

• Make size and base required — a required choice cannot be skipped, so the kitchen never guesses whether a pizza is a 12" or a 14", or whether the customer wanted the stuffed edge they paid for.
• Price each topping individually — do not use one flat "extra toppings" fee. Charging per topping means a pizza with four extras costs more than one with a single extra, and your margin holds whichever way the customer builds it.
• Set surcharges where the cost is real — a stuffed crust, a gluten-free base or extra cheese costs you more to make, so attach a modest surcharge (say £1.50 for a stuffed edge) rather than absorbing it silently on every order.
• Add a free-text box for the odd request — "light on the sauce", "well done", "cut into squares for the kids". It catches the things no modifier list can cover, and the note lands on the same ticket as the build.

Set up this way, a 14" pepperoni with extra cheese, a stuffed edge and no olives arrives at the till already priced to the penny — and the customer paid for exactly what they are getting, not a rounded guess.

Pizza sells on offers, and the right deal lifts your average order value rather than eating into it. The trick is to build deals that give the customer a reason to spend a little more — not ones that quietly discount the order you would have taken at full price anyway.

Meal deals do the heavy lifting. A large pizza, a side of garlic bread and a bottle of drink for £18.95 feels like value to the customer and pulls two extra items onto an order that might otherwise have been a single pizza. Sides and drinks carry a healthy margin, so bundling them is where a meal deal earns its keep.

Use timing and order type to steer demand. A collection discount — 10% off when the customer collects — costs you nothing in delivery and rewards the orders that are cheapest for you to fulfil. A quiet-night offer, like 2-for-1 on midweek collection, fills the Tuesday and Wednesday gaps without touching your busy weekend prices. A small first-order discount is a fair way to win a new customer, provided it applies once.

Know your floor before you discount. A 9" pizza that costs you £2.20 in ingredients has room to move; a buy-one-get-one on your most-loaded 14" specials might not. Work out the food cost of the pizzas a deal applies to and make sure the discounted price still clears it comfortably. A deal that shifts volume but sells each pizza at a loss is worse than no deal at all.

• Let deals apply themselves — automatic rules add the offer at checkout with no code to type. A midweek 2-for-1 that just appears on a Tuesday order converts far better than one hidden behind a code the customer has to remember.
• Bundle where the margin sits — add sides and drinks to a pizza rather than discounting the pizza itself. The customer feels the value, and you keep more of it than a straight percentage off would leave you.
• Set conditions so offers do not stack into a loss — a minimum spend, one deal per order, or an offer limited to collection keeps a promotion from combining with another into a price that no longer pays for the pizza.
• Point your deals at your quiet times — a midweek or early-evening offer fills the slow slots. There is little sense discounting the Friday orders that would come in at full price regardless.

Friday and Saturday between 7pm and 9pm is when a pizzeria makes its money — and when everything can fall over. Forty orders landing in the same fifteen minutes means cold pizzas, blown lead times and customers ringing to ask where their order is. The fix is not to work faster; it is to control the flow of orders so the kitchen never takes on more than one oven can handle.

Cap what the kitchen can accept. Order throttling lets you set how many orders — or how many pizzas — you will take in a given window. Once a 15-minute slot is full, the next customer is offered the following one. Nobody is turned away; the rush is simply spread across bookable slots instead of all arriving at once. Your ovens set the ceiling, not the queue.

Use prep and lead times to stagger tickets. Set a realistic prep time for a pizza and a longer lead time when you are busy, so the quoted "ready in" stretches honestly as orders build. Customers ordering ahead for later drop into their own slots, which pulls demand off the peak. A customer told 45 minutes and given a hot pizza in 45 minutes is happier than one promised 20 and left waiting.

Put every order on a kitchen screen. A live kitchen display beats a spike of paper tickets. Orders appear in the order they are due, the full build shown clearly — half pepperoni, no olives, stuffed edge — and marked off as they go in and come out of the oven. The team works from one screen rather than shuffling dockets, and nothing gets missed at the busiest moment of the week.

• Throttle to your oven capacity — set the per-slot limit to the number of pizzas you can actually turn out in that window. It is the difference between a busy night and a night where every pizza goes out late.
• Separate collection and delivery timing — a collection order needs only prep time; a delivery order needs prep plus the drive. Quote them differently so a customer walking in for collection is not held to a delivery timeline.
• Let customers order ahead — taking orders for later, not just as-soon-as-possible, moves demand off the peak. The office party ordering at 5pm for 8pm is one less ticket in your 8pm crush.
• Keep customers updated automatically — a confirmation, then a message when the order is out for delivery, means fewer "where is my pizza?" calls tying up the phone exactly when the kitchen needs the team on the ovens.

Handled this way, your busiest two hours run on a steady rhythm rather than a scramble. Orders come in at a pace the kitchen can hold, every pizza goes out hot, and you get through Friday night with your reputation — and your evening — intact.