three interwoven websites for a pizza franchise

The background/what are the ingredients?

Let’s talk PIZZA! Peetri Pizza was founded in 1990 and has now successfully opened around 50 pizzerias all over Estonia with plans to branch across the border. In 2020 Peetri Pizza prepared almost 1.5 million pizzas. In 2020 the Peetri Pizza team decided that it’s about time to take the brand and digital solutions to the 21st century. The goal was to create a solution for ordering pizzas directly online without involving any third-party services. 

Like in many other projects of our project, Peetri Pizza was also done in collaboration with our awesome friends at NOPE.

The challenge/how do you mix the dough together?

Peetri Pizza took upon a major challenge to rebrand themselves, the project was going to be massive and the website was just one part of it.

Biggest challenge was not to create three websites, but three interwoven systems which communicate with each other seamlessly. What we needed to do was to create a link between the customer and the pizzeria, so that when someone orders a pizza, the pizzeria could accept the offer and display live updates on the progress to the buyer on the other side. 

In order to prevent a situation where the customer orders a pizza from 200km away, we had to integrate a fixed location ordering system into the pizzeria web application, where the pizzeria can choose the radius, in which they do food deliveries. 

Also, since Peetri Pizza is a franchise, all of the pizzerias around Estonia can have slightly different menus, prices and opening times. In order to maintain a measure of autonomy, a lot of the values are flexible and customizable.

On the subject of customizability it would be a good time to mention the administrative environment. Using Laravel, we created a solution that is a kind of a dashboard where you can send information to various channels and get an overview of the orders, customer feedback, reasons for order rejections and lots of other useful data.

The fact that the whole application runs in the browser introduced some unexpected challenges. For example, how do you communicate with the customer when they close their internet browser? For this reason we’re starting to think about the possibility of a dedicated phone app…

The process/oven time, baby!

The client came to us with his idea in the February of 2020 and that’s when the project kicked off. While NOPE was working on refreshing the brand and creating a fabulous UX/UI, we were left to deal with what we do best – awesome web solutions.

Because we needed to create something completely different and new compared to the old website, we set our sights on releasing an MVP in June 2020. In order to create a website where both ends, the pizzeria and the customer would get live updates without the need to refresh the page, we needed to use Websockets with NodeJS. We also needed to do a lot of customer research in order to create the best user experience possible. Simplicity, but at the same time practicality and functionality was key.

To create the perfect admin page we used Laravel together with Voyager Admin package, which allowed us to easily create the dream site for any admin. No hard-coded solutions and full customization.

As a final product we managed to get all three to communicate – admin view, customer window and the pizzeria tablet view. The first version of the website was released on the 25th of June 2020 and the second at the end of July, but it doesn’t stop there.

Here at gotoAndPlay we believe that when offering services, one must stay for longer to ensure that the needs of the customer are fulfilled and everything works properly. Today, more than a year has passed since the first step of the project, but work with the Peetri Pizza web solution is still ongoing – soon we will release features for user accounts and bonus points and as mentioned before, there are plans for a Peetri Pizza mobile application.