5.1 Critique Your Competitor's E-Commerce Website

There are six rules to getting and keeping customers in e-commerce. I have looked at Papajohns.com to determine how our competitor’s site stacks up against them.

The first rule is that websites should offer something unique. Their site seems to differ very little from the websites of competitors. In addition, one can get basically the same service by calling or picking up. Other than industry standard pizza customization, their website offers nothing unique.

The second rule states that the site should be pleasing. The website isn’t bunched up, but it is poorly designed. The front page has a picture of Papa John holding a football behind a green background. On a widescreen monitor, there is also a picture of a football field. In addition, the bottom of the website has a poor fade to white which contrasts very poorly with the rest of the site.

The third rule is the website must be easy to use and fast. The three main options at the top make it fairly easy to make your own pizza or order from their menu. Making and ordering the pizza also seem to be easy. Once you get into making your own pizza, you can easily select toppings and choose whether or not you want the topping on the whole pizza or just half. Alexa claims the site is faster than 66% of all sites on the web.

The fourth rule is that the website must motivate people to visit. There is nothing unique about the site to get you to visit, but it is easy to make sure you get your order right. In addition, each Papa Johns has special offers for specific areas which can be easily customized to each community and demographic.

 

The fifth rule is that you must advertise your presence on the web. When searching for terms like Pizza or Pizza delivery, Papa was either 2 or 3 on Google with similar results on Bing. According to Alexa all but one query that led people to papajohns.com had the words Papa Johns in it. Because of this, I would argue they are doing a poor job pulling people not already looking for their website in.

 

The sixth rule is to learn from your website. It is difficult to tell how much they are using web analytics to focus their website on the things their users care about. They have updated their pizza customizer to make it more visual, allowing a customer to better see how their custom pizza is constructed. In addition, the focus on speed seems to show they know how quickly a customer will go to a competitor if they have to wait for a page to load.