Amore Pizzeria

AT A GLANCE

Amore Pizzeria — food ordering app

• Sector: Food and drink, hospitality, online ordering
• Platforms: iOS and Android mobile app
• What we did: Product strategy, UX and UI design for menu browsing and customisation, basket and delivery-or-collection flow, quick checkout with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and back-of-house automation
• Headline outcome: 50,000+ app orders, and a small pizzeria grown into a multi-million pound business with three further locations

THE CHALLENGE

Winning the direct relationship back from the aggregators

Amore Pizzeria was a single site built on walk-in trade. Growing beyond the counter meant the aggregator platforms — UberEats, Deliveroo and JustEat — and their commission on every order. The deeper cost is not the fee, it is ownership: the platform holds the customer, sets the offers and takes the repeat business. The brief was to turn single-use customers into repeat customers by giving them a direct route to order.

Food ordering is deceptively hard to design. A pizza menu is not a list, it is a set of choices — size, base, toppings, sides, dips and deals — and every one of those choices is a place an order can be abandoned. People order on a phone, hungry, often at the same time each week, and they will not tolerate re-answering questions they have already answered. Delivery and collection need different information at different moments. And a direct app has to feel faster than the aggregator already installed on the phone, or it will not get opened.

WHAT WE DESIGNED

One job, done faster than anyone else

We designed an iOS and Android app around a single job: get a familiar order paid for in seconds.

• Menu browsing with inline customisation. Size, base and toppings are resolved on the item rather than a separate screen, so building a customised pizza never pulls the customer out of the menu.
• A basket that stays editable. Changing a topping late does not mean starting again — one of the most common abandonment points in food ordering, removed.
• Delivery or collection as an explicit fork. Address, timing and fulfilment details are asked only where they are actually relevant, so collection customers are never walked through delivery steps.
• Quick checkout with Apple Pay and Google Pay. The path from opening the app to paying was tuned until a returning customer could check out in seven seconds.
• Registration and saved details. Returning customers reorder rather than re-enter, which is what turns a first order into a habit.
• Direct-only offers and pricing. Deals the aggregators could not match, giving customers a concrete reason to change channel.
• Back-of-house automation. Critical processes were automated so orders reached the kitchen without manual re-keying, and staff time went into food rather than admin.

RESULTS

Record-breaking sales, and a business that outgrew one site

• 50,000+ orders placed through the app.
• 5,000+ user registrations.
• Seven-second checkout for a returning customer.
• Record-breaking sales on launch, and records that have continued to break since.

On the back of that increased revenue, Amore Pizzeria expanded to three further locations and grew from a small pizzeria into a multi-million pound business.

FREQUENTLY ASKED

Commissioning a food ordering app

Is an own-brand ordering app worth it versus delivery platforms?

It depends on how much repeat trade you already have. Aggregators are genuinely good at reaching customers you would not otherwise reach, but they take a commission on every order and keep the customer relationship, so you cannot market to the person who orders from you every week. An own-brand app earns its place once a meaningful share of your orders are repeat: those orders reach you at a lower cost per order, and you can offer prices the platforms will not. For Amore Pizzeria the app carried more than 50,000 orders and helped fund three further sites.

What drives repeat orders in a food app?

Speed and memory, mostly. People order similar things at similar times, so the app should remember their details, saved payment and previous orders, and strip out every step that asks something already answered. Amore Pizzeria’s checkout was built around Apple Pay and Google Pay so a returning customer can pay in about seven seconds. Direct-only pricing and offers then give them a reason to open your app instead of an aggregator.

How long does it take to design a food ordering app?

Menu complexity drives the timeline more than screen count does. The core flows are few — browse, customise, basket, delivery or collection, checkout — but a menu with sizes, bases, toppings, sides and meal deals takes real work to structure, and that structure is what the whole app rests on. For most independent restaurants the design phase is measured in weeks, with build, payment and kitchen integration, and testing on top; we scope it against your actual menu rather than quoting a number blind.

Related services

Ordering apps live or die on how quickly a familiar order can be repeated. If you are pricing one up, how much app design costs in the UK explains what shapes the budget for a menu, basket and checkout build. If you already have an app that customers open once and then abandon, app redesign is usually the better route than starting again. We are an app design agency in London — get started and tell us about your sites.