In the entirety of 1999, Dominos Pizza took £100,000 in online sales in the UK. In 2001, it took just a month to make the same amount; by 2003, that time had fallen to a week. In 2013, Dominos sold £100,000 of pizzas online every 13 minutes.

Thats according to head of eCommerce Paul Francis, speaking today at the Mobile Retail Summit – and that growth is, unsurprisingly, being driven by mobile. In the past four years, Dominos took a combined £170m through mCommerce; Francis said the business is on track to take £200m this year alone

Mobile accounted for 38 per cent of the £38m of Dominos online sales in 2013, with iOS making up the lions share, at 28.5 per cent – 21 per cent on iPhone, 7.5 per cent iPad. Android lagged behind at nine per cent, and Windows Phone at just 0.5 per cent.

However, Android is by far the fastest growing platform, and Francis said he expects it to overtake iOS sales over the next 12-18 months. Offering a theory on why that is, he said: “In the early days of smartphones, if you wanted a premium handset, the only option was to get an iPhone. Now, as those people are started to reach the end of their contracts and upgrade their device, there are many more premium Android handsets out there.”

Adapting to the customer
“Think about what made you great as a brand, and then build your experience around the customer,” Francis said. “Were different from other retail brands in that we fulfill an immediate need. For consumers, thats very different experience to buying a sofa.”

This means that the decision is more immediate, but also changes customers expectations – while people might be happy with the broad delivery estimates of a service like Amazon, theyll be unhappy if their delivery doesnt arrive within 10-15 minutes of the expected time.

Its for this reason that Dominos introduced a Pizza Tracker feature to its site and apps, to give continuous feedback on the progress of an order to combat what Francis called “the period of anxiety between order and the pizza arriving at your door”.

The same insight seems to be driving the companys direction for the future, which is focused on improving the process for locating nearby stores, increasing the level of customisation and generally “making the experience as friction-free as possible”.

That has led to the development of a responsive website, currently rolling out gradually across the UK, as Dominos attempts to make sure all features are deployed evenly on every platform.

“We work really hard to make sure there is no inferior channel,” said Francis. “The decision of how to make a purchase is is up to the customers, not us.”