How To Increase Pizza Sales With the Right POS System

93% of people eat pizza at least once per month. 

This is great news for pizza restaurants – you have a built in customer base with such a popular product. But this also means that the market is saturated, and the key to capitalizing on this popularity is customer retention. Technology is essential here, providing the support and tools you need to build a successful restaurant – even in such a busy industry. Pizza restaurant software can do wonders for building a solid customer base, track your data, and ultimately grow your sales. 

If you’re looking for how to grow and improve your pizza business, and how to increase pizza sales, we’re here to help. Here are some things to look for when choosing the best pizza POS system for your restaurant. 

Benefits of a Pizza POS System

Support In-House Driver Management 

Delivery is essential to any pizza business. If you don’t have in-house drivers, a delivery system directly integrated into your POS and online ordering means that you can dispatch local drivers through an on-demand network. 

And if you do, in-house driver management makes all the difference in setting delivery areas, assigning delivery fees, and making sure each driver has the right order to bring to each customer. 

Clearly Call Out Takeout and Delivery Orders

And, with your kitchen display system, you can set different ticket border colors for takeout and/or delivery orders and allow your staff to easily recognize which orders should be packaged up or run to tables. 

Schedule Orders in Advance

Built into a great pizza POS is the ability to schedule orders ahead of time. For holidays or game days, guests can schedule orders days in advance – this ensures that they get their orders on time, and allows you to plan ahead for those busy days, in terms of staffing as well as inventory.

Integrate With Third-Party Services

If you’re using a third-party delivery service, you’ll want to make sure that it works well with the rest of your technology. 

Figuring out the flow from third party orders to your point of sale can be time consuming and inefficient for your team, especially during peak hours. Toast directly integrates with DoorDash and GrubHub to make this process as seamless as possible. 

With this integration, you can manage all third party menus in one place, fire orders directly to the kitchen, and not worry about any double entry or chaotic missed tickets. 

Track Data and Report Your Sales

The ability to see restaurant sales and other data in real-time gives you actionable insight into how your labor, menu, and other expenses are actually translating into sales at any given time.

The menu reporting is key here. You’ll be able to see what menu items are doing well, what aren’t as popular, and how to adjust your menu accordingly. Identify the menu items that are driving revenue and those that are a drag on your bottom line to optimize your menu. Compare sales of menu groups and individual items within a specified timeframe. Are there menu items from the previous owner that aren't selling as well? Remove them. Are there certain toppings that cost more than they're worth? Eliminate them. 

Your pizza POS system should be able to track inventory and food cost percentage so you can engineer your menu to your needs. Not only should your pizza POS system allow customers to place online orders, it should also track these orders in pizza sales reports and product mix reports.

Collect Your Customers’ Emails and Phone Numbers

Pizza shop marketing is critical to finding new customers and keeping the regulars coming back. And behind the most successful campaigns is targeting and data.

Your POS and online ordering channels are generating valuable data every day. Don’t let this data go to waste: you can use to drive your marketing efforts. 

Email marketing is a powerful tool to grow repeat guest visits. Once you collect email addresses from your guests (your customer data) you can continue to build a relationship, enticing them to come back, again and again. 

With Toast, you’ll automatically grow your email list when new guests place orders for takeout or delivery, or when they’re dining in-store and opt to sign up for your loyalty program. This type of technology streamlines your guest engagement and helps build a robust email marketing program. With this data, plus a great email platform, you can build automated promotional campaigns, newsletters, loyalty reminders – the possibilities are endless. 

Create a Loyalty Program From the Register

There are few things as valuable to restaurants than customer loyalty, especially in a competitive market like pizza.

With a loyalty program built in to the POS, guests can tie their rewards directly to their credit card rather than having to carry around a separate punch card. And once again, this full POS and loyalty integration helps you build up customer data and better target your marketing efforts – all on one platform. Not to mention, you avoid the hassle and expense of yet another technology vendor.

Train and Support Your Staff

Pizza restaurants can be hectic – with in-house service, take-out, and delivery all coming from one kitchen. This can be difficult for new staff members, and it can take time to get up to speed. 

Easy staff training and support go hand in hand with a robust POS system. Integrated payroll and team management makes it all the easier to onboard employees and stay on top of each pay period. And digital onboarding workflows make it easy for new hires to get going quickly. 

And the data is there to help manage the team, as well. With a solid reporting feature, you’ll be able to quickly decide if you need to add staff in certain areas or send certain staff members home early to keep your labor costs on track towards meeting your financial goals. The ability to dig into specific data allows you to identify the servers that are turning tables the fastest, delivery drivers that are the most efficient, and staff who may need additional attention or training.

What Makes a Pizzeria Different From Other Restaurants? 

A pizza restaurant is unlike any other: with a fully customizable menu, high popularity and an emphasis on speed and convenience, pizza restaurants are in a league of their own. 

Pizzas are completely customizable, with many different topping options and combinations.  Hyper-customizability also makes pizzerias particularly susceptible to over-portioning and misplaced inventory – making inventory management key for reducing food waste and ensuring maximum profitability. 

And popularity and order volume is another differentiating factor: nearly 50% of pizzas are for carryout, and having the right technology to keep track of multiple orders through your POS, online ordering, and delivery is essential to efficiency. Toast recently introduced Fast Service Mode: a pared-down POS screen that is designed specifically for pizzerias. This helps cut down on ordering mistakes and make everything as seamless as possible. 

Related Pizzeria Resources

• Cost to Open a Pizzeria

• Pizzeria Marketing Ideas

• Pizzeria Business Plan

• Pizza POS System

• How to Open a Pizza Shop