Pizza My Heart teamed up with a third-party online-ordering provider to streamline delivery orders and find new, cost-effective ways to delivery targeted marketing messages.

“I didn't realize that people don't always want that contact. They want the Web,” Hammers explains. Corporate customers wanted to order pizza for meetings from the office. The Web sped the process along.

Hammers saw the Web light when Pizza My Heart started working with GetQuik more than a year ago. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is a destination Web site, like eBay, where hungry diners go to find and order from participating restaurants (currently more than 100). GetQuik Founder and CEO Ken Ryu estimates that per unit, the average annual GetQuik transaction volume is $9,000.

In the last six months, Pizza My Heart's delivery orders on the Web rose to 6 percent from 2 percent. In some busy locales, such as a beachfront store, Hammers says he saw customers get in the back of the line, use the Web application on their iPhone to place an order and pick it up by the time they got to the front of the line.

Average check from online orders are five times higher than in-store orders at Pizza My Heart.

More than just the labor savings, Pizza My Heart sees Web ordering as a way to target marketing efforts to specific customers for far less than traditional marketing or even e-newsletters.

“Instead of throwing four or five offers at them, we just send one,” Hammers says. Recent offers included two-for-one slices on Friday afternoons and Monday night football specials only ordered through the Web. “They have brought in new customers,” he says.

Restaurants pay GetQuik 10 percent per order received through the site, but GetQuik covers the credit card fees, so Hammers says it is closer to 7 percent. He gets detailed data about who ordered when and from where, and there are no monthly fees.

Finally, Pizza My Heart doesn't pay if there is not an order placed. You can't say that for direct mail.

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