So… how exactly is your pricing setup that made it so difficult to use with their online ordering system? One of the main reasons I am doing this is for online order, if that is going to be problematic than that sort of gives me pause.
Piper, I too would like some more info on the menu difficulties you had with Big Holler so I know all the right questions to ask while in Vegas in a couple weeks.
The problem is that I have specialty pizzas set up as toppings on top of a cheese pizza base. So if you order my Large “Supreme” for instance, it sells a Large cheese pizza, and a “Supreme” on top of it. The “Supreme” has a price that adds to the cheese, and has a separate inventory recipe to account for the toppings. This is the way POS recommends setting it up, and I completely agree. The software works beautifully in this configuration. It makes reporting much easier, and more importantly, makes the integrated inventory system function much smoother.
Big Holler’s system can’t handle that - they need specialties to be sold as one item. So when the order comes into me, I need to have just one item called “Supreme” that includes everything including the cheese pizza base. That breaks all of my reporting that uses the number of pizzas sold for the day, and breaks my inventory system. On top of that, it wouldn’t allow half and half specialty pizzas. Before deciding it wasn’t an option for me I ran the stats and found I have 14% of my pizzas being sold with a half specialty. That’s 14% of my customers that can’t order they way they want - and then getting agitated because they have to call in anyway, hence defeating the purpose of online ordering.
Stacy told me it couldn’t be done because they didn’t have pictures to go with the specialty pizzas. I told her fine, I don’t need a picture with it. She told me it has to have a picture. I told her to use the one that I saw in their gallery that says “Specialty Pizza”. She said that wasn’t an option. She said she had never encountered a menu set up like mine, and I would need to change it to accommodate their system.
Oh really? Here’s pcueeze and Daddio with the exact same complaint two years prior:
http://thinktank.pmq.com/threads/big-holler-point-of-success-questions.10143/#post-69594
I told her fine, put my specialty pizzas on another “build your own” menu. She said that wouldn’t work because using them as toppings would list all of the specialty pizzas at the cheese price on the main menu. I told her fine, I would word the menu to explain how it works. She still said it couldn’t be done.
She also told me “all of this was programmed years ago, we can’t just go changing it”… which leads me to believe there is no programmer on staff there. They have a system that isn’t likely to change in the near future.
As I said in my last post, I went into their online portal and figured out a way to do it myself in about 10 minutes but at that point I was done. It also didn’t allow for you to remove a topping for a specialty pizza - and over 30% of the specialty pizzas I sell have some sort of modification where a topping is removed.
I understand that Big Holler doesn’t really “get” the pizza thing but unfortunately, like many POS users, I happen to own a pizzeria!
Let me iterate that NONE of these problems are related to Point of Success. I love the software, Inborne, Jeff and the entire crew over there. I can’t even calculate what my ROI is on switching to this software - it’s through the roof. I understand (or at least believe) there was a rush to get online ordering functionality in the software and it made the most sense to partner with a business that already had a system up and running, but I would have much preferred to wait for a solution (or at least a connector) designed, coded and supported by Inborne’s engineers that already understand their software and users.
Online ordering has become important to businesses like ours. If I purchase an online ordering module directly from my POS provider I think it should work with the software out of the box.
