Most of the comments here are focused on the question of why you would prefer an app to calling. The author's point is a great one though, and something I've wondered a lot. Why should I create an account to order a pizza? The app should reduce friction even from the very first order. Instead it adds, and adds for every order... Got to go look up coupon codes! On the phone I just ask the guy what their best deal is in a large cheese and garlic knots and he gives it to me. The app or website should make my life better but instead it's harder.
Worse, the app pretends to be an unrelated party when something goes wrong. "Sorry, you need to call the store. Look up their number, it's on the website." For me it doesn't add anything to the transaction, it only takes away.
The literal only reason I use the pizza app at all is for chains where I have no idea which store delivers to me. Rest of the time I've gone back to calling. Much faster that way.
This is 100% backward from my experience. Having an account is a 1-time cost, and not only a small one, but one I do for hundreds of other things every day. Logging in is a keystroke that has my password manager auto type my username and password; again something I repeat daily.
With the situation in the US at least, trying to get anyone on the phone is an exercise in frustration. The app (for me, so far) has always been up. The employees don't have to stop making the product to take an order. They don't know the specials, or don't care to look them up which might be changing on an HOURLY basis. The app knows. On the phone I have to go through my order painstakingly each time; the app knows what I've ordered and I can single-click repeat it.
And honestly, all they're doing is taking my order and putting it into probably an admin version OF THE SAME APP. It's LITERALLY the old game of "telephone", but for something I want to buy.
I have "account fatigue"; I am so tired of having to create accounts and log in to things - yes, it's something I repeat daily, and that's the problem. Just let me buy the damn pizza, or whatever it is! I always use the "guest" option when available.
That's what the login with Google and login with Facebook options are for. They're there to help you and improve Your life. Come along now, and relinquish your daily quota of private information. We can either do this the easy way or the hard way. Don't you want to be a good model Product? We'll send you to the new colony on Mars when it gets built!
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While typing the above (a bit of ▧am improv) I had this a bit of a "oh" moment as I envisioned the idea of the "good model citizen" a la China or the USSR, except instead of the... ideal being like *that* it's about being Your Best Most Optimally Saleable You.
I have a dream that one day I will leave Google, and that won't ever happen if every site that I use is connected to my Google account.
I should really have a password manager set up properly as well, but that's just another job, and scary in some way. I have a password manager but it's all manual, no autogenerating accounts or fancy stuff.
I totally agree, especially when it comes to creating an account on a corporate/national app when the business I deal with is local only.
Having said that I think Domino's Pizza has a great process for ordering pizza on their web site where you build you own pizza and can then track the progress all the way to your doorstep.
In theory you have a point. But installing a user hostile app is a total dealbreaker. And I guarantee that the eula is not only illegal but an absolute shitshow of trying to exploit paying customers so that the library of whatever third party module required to view an image could earn a sixteenth of a cent per pizza.
And that is always the case. Just call instead.
Unfortunately you can't do that for everything. Just today I was practically forced to install and give away "my" phone number to the worst app you can ever imagine, just to be able to park.
I will say that when I say "app", I mean web app. I don't use the phone app, although most of my post is still relevant there. My reasons for that are mainly that I'm at home on my big screen with a real keyboard 99% of the time that I'm ordering pizza and it's just easier.
In my country there's a website that works in every major city and their suburbs that aggregates basically all restaurants, pizzerias, pierogarnias etc.
And you don't have to have an account, the address and payment details are filled in by the browser autocomplete.
So the friction is - click on the menu, click "order", type in the wireless transfer code.
Also - almost nobody orders "pick up" pizza here, so phone requires you to specify the address every time which is significantly more friction.
> so phone requires you to specify the address every time which is significantly more friction.
For some restaurants this is not true, they save your (phone number -> address) mapping the first time you call, and in the future ask for confirmation whether the address is correct.
Chat, or message apps might be the best way yet. They don't need signup but easy to get your point across precisely.
I ordered pickup through an app because I don't speak the local language but I had a flat tire so I needed to coordinate the delivery through phone (again, in a language I barely speak). They couldn't understand my address so we switched to whatsapp and could send them the coordinates. Twenty minutes later the person was there with a still hot pizza.
In another case I just texted the local pizza guy on whatsapp what I wanted and he replied 'where to deliver it?', and then 10 minutes later it arrived.
This is also a very cheap solution for merchants: only requires a mobile phone and a free app that almost everyone has in some countries. If push comes to shove, install Signal/Telegram or accept SMS.
> The app or website should make my life better but instead it's harder.
This is the sub-goal, but not ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to maximize the profit, with accounts created, all the analytics will work out, and they could do all kinds of promotions or targeted ads.
I guess that's the same reason why you are asked to install a mobile app whenever you visit Reddit mobile WEBSITE. It does not attempt to make your life better. At least it's not the ultimate goal of ecosystem.
Yet here there is more pressure to not scare customers away. To not make their life troublesome.
Woe to the pizza company who thinks "we don't need to care about customer retention, our pizza is just too good."
I have dozens of pizza places to order from, all within delivery distance. Make ordering difficult, and as long as the competition is pretty much as tasty, I'll move on.
> I guess that's the same reason why you are asked to install a mobile app whenever you visit Reddit mobile WEBSITE.
Yeah, Reddit's approach to making so difficult to access the mobile on a whim, especially in an ephemeral browser, is a straight up UX dark pattern. I use Reddit less on mobile because of it...
I want to stay in the browser where I have things like ad blockers and can open a bunch of tabs at once and bounce around easily, etc.
>> Why should I create an account to order a pizza?
Most of the apps in my area (Toronto, Canada) absolutely do not require account creation and allow you to just use a ‘guest’ account; usually just requiring (reasonably) your phone number.
As to why I’d want an account to order?
Let’s say I have a local favourite pizza joint and a favourite pizza I like to order. Having my personal info and payment info already filled out and hitting ‘reorder’ makes ordering and paying a literal 5 second experience.
Since it’s optional almost everywhere online and in app here; I don’t see the big fuss.
I ordered from Jolibee last night and was happy to find out I didn’t need to make an account, since I don’t eat there often; unlike my local pizza joint. I used the guest system and my girlfriend just gave them my name and picked it up.
Just FYI, this is something I really like about Google Maps integration with restaurant take-out ordering. They put the "Order Again" button front and center and let's face it, I'm not really planning to switch it up at my corner lunch spot. Obviously in that case I need an account, with Google, but I already had that and I trust them with my info more than I just some merchant's white-label mobile app.
I had a restaurant screw up my order via Google's ordering platform and there was no one to ask for a refund -- the Google platform doesn't accept complaints about the merchant, and there's no way to contact the merchant through the Google platform after your order is complete. They forgot an item in my order and so overcharged me by like 40%. YMMV
As far as I could determine the ordering button on Google works entirely via third parties. I get a receipt by email from e.g. postmates when I use it.
I do agree that the site which is closest to the customer should be providing the support.
A lot of times with food apps I don't immediately see how to set the pickup time or don't have a lot of faith that it really is going to be ready when I want it.
When I talk to somebody on the phone I feel a lot more sure.
I worked at a place near Union Square, NYC and was in the habit of ordering food for pickup from sweetgreen because I knew it all worked. I have thought about ordering from restaurants in Collegetown, Ithaca from the web but just haven't gotten in the habit because I don't feel the certainty.
Without talking to somebody on the phone, often I don't have a lot of faith that the order will even be received. Sometimes the place closes but the app happily continues to take orders. Other times the order simply gets lost in the ether. After a while, you learn which places are not worth the risk of ordering from online.
I remember a long time ago when food apps were really new putting in an online order at a sub shop which is a well oiled machine. (The kind of place they'd write a business school case study about.)
A restaurant with absolutely excellent process for handling walk-in traffic can fail entirely faced with an occasional online order. In their case they made the sub half an hour before I requested it be ready and stuffed it in some corner where they couldn't find it.
In the last two years I've seen the small facilities run by Cornell Dining go from handling almost all in-person order to handling a large fraction (between 1/3 and 2/3) of online orders. In-person orders are handled by Kanban-style process where the people making the food take orders at they clear work-in-progress. I'm not really sure how they handle online orders that aren't gated by this. I suspect there are many indirect effects, for instance, I think because the traffic patterns are more complicated it would be easier to walk out without paying for your food. (On the other hand, I'm a member of a cohort of middle-aged people who complicate traffic flows by going into line to pay for food before it is ready because that's efficient.)
Anyhow, once I know a place is good for handling online orders I'm inclined to do so. But if I'm not sure I'm much more inclined to go in and do things the old fashioned way.
I use Uber Eats for ordering food exclusively exactly because when there is a screw up and I receive the wrong item or none at all, I get refunded immediately by Uber with a few taps.
Uber Eats sent my order to restaurants that were absolutely not open. After two times, and two refunds, they stopped refunding me because of a “pattern of suspicious behavior”. No way to escalate review to a human. None at all. So maybe be aware of your choice
I had a huge delivery of Chinese food left on my doorstep (it was still quite hot). Obviously, delivered to the wrong address. The bill was fully itemized and stapled to one of the Uber bags and it came to just short of $200 but there was no correct address and no telephone number to be found on it anywhere.
Anyway, I did my best to contact Uber Eats to get the delivery person to collect it but to no awail. Checked everywhere for a telephone number including searching the internet and found nothing except the number that explained how to place an order. When I rang it, it had a recording - no hunan to be found anywhere.
I couldn't log in on online as I didn't have an account.
And no one reappeared from Uber to reclaim it.
Anyway, I gave up. There was so much food I couldn't get it all into the freezer. It lasted several weeks. Saved a lot on food bills over that time.
Even if the bag was sealed, I don't think they could take it back once it left the delivery person's custody. That's usually how these operations work (but not sure about Uber Eats specifically). Too much risk of food tampering or other mischief.
Very likely. But he couldn't have gone more than a couple of minutes. I'm surprised I didn't hear him.
What I'm still unclear about is that someone nearby ordered the food, as I didn't answer immediately why didn't he ring hone to base or to the planned recipient for an address correction?
The restaurant had its name on the bill but no telephone number. Presumably, this done to stop or reduce telephone complaints direct to the restaurant. Seems that everything must be done online.
I was a very slow adopter of Uber rides many years ago. When talking to some evangelist at that time offering me codes for free rides, one of the reasons I gave for not using Uber at that time, was that it was completely dependent on smartphone apps, therefore being unusable to certain portions of the population (old non-technical people, those who lost their phone, those who use an OS other than Android or iOS, dead battery and no charging cable, etc.). I foresaw that should it outcompete traditional services to the point of bankruptcy, those people would be left unserviced. I proposed having a web UI and a phone line.
It is sad to see that prediction coming true in various fields. This strong bias against having customer service people, against customers having any way to talk to a person, is noxious to society at large.
I guess in the same line of thought, I find the abandonment of the public phone system to be sad. Instead of replacing old phones with newer terminals with internet capabilities, we abandoned the entire system. Therefore making the world a bit more unequal and a bit more dependent on personal devices.
Related anecdote: last time my smartphone battery died and i had to make a phone call, i walked into the nearest café just like i did many years back, and asked to borrow their phone. They were very suspicious and unfriendly, to say the least, despite having ordered a cup of coffee first. This was a very normal practice not long ago...
>therefore being unusable to certain portions of the population (old non-technical people, those who lost their phone, those who use an OS other than Android or iOS, dead battery and no charging cable, etc.)
FWIW uber has had a web app for years now, and before that there were a plenty of unofficial clients. I remember calling Ubers from my laptop in 2016.
I’ve had food sitting at restaurants for over an hour before while Uber attempts to find a driver.
After a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me, I did manage to find a support inbox that’s read by an escalation team and I had a real life human calling from SF let me know that they would refund me.
The effort it took to get the refund was ridiculous though as every contact option Uber presented me resulted in robo responses telling me since I initiated the cancel that I’d be responsible for food costs, even when I included chat screenshots of their agents telling me to cancel.
Uber Eats will lie and blame the restaurant for being slow when they can't find a driver.
The order status will stay on "preparing your order" for an hour while I know full well (by calling the restaurant directly) that the food was ready for over an hour. Sometimes it'll switch to "driver on the way to pick up" and then back to "preparing your order" which makes no sense.
Deliveroo is was similar in that aspect back in 2018, not sure if that's changed now.
Regarding your refund, a chargeback is the typical way to deal with such scum, and the evidence (chat screenshots) will make it an open & shut case.
I usually at least make a decent attempt at resolving these types of conflicts before reporting to AMEX. Even though AMEX's chargeback process is probably the best of the credit card companies I've used, it's still not as ideal as simply getting the refund from the merchant, if possible.
Oddly enough, I've NEVER had this issue with DoorDash. I think DoorDash simply makes restaurants unavailable if they don't have drivers, whereas UberEats ALWAYS takes the order and then simply doesn't fulfill it if they can't. What you say about "preparing your order" is 100% correct. There isn't a "waiting for driver" status, so if there is no driver on the way, it stays at "preparing..."
This is a particularly terrible customer experience since you almost always time your deliveries so you eat them right when they get there and you are hungry when they arrive. By the time you realize Uber is not going to bother fulfilling your order, you've already probably been waiting 30 minutes, cannot cancel then without being charged, and have to start making other plans for food as you get hangrier and hangrier. It's even worse when you're getting food for the whole family delivered and have to deal with hangry kids!
I don't use Ubereats anymore because of multiple bad experiences, but I've found that often now even if you call the restaurant directly to order they will use Ubereats to deliver.
If that happens, that is the last time I order from that restaurant.
> I’ve had food sitting at restaurants for over an hour before while Uber attempts to find a driver.
If you're in a metro area ordering during ordinary hours and having this happen, it's almost certainly because the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them. The thing about Uber's intermediation is that if you had this sort of experience by ordering directly through the restaurant, you'd rightly associate the experience with the restaurant's failures, but with Uber, it feels like Uber failing.
> a particularly frustrating instance where Uber told me to cancel but didn’t refund me for me
UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
> the restaurant has developed a bad reputation and people refuse to work with them
Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem? That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
Uber Eats positions itself as an end-to-end managed service where you pay money to receive delivered food, and charges hefty fees (on both sides of the transaction) for doing so. It's up to them to make sure this works by implementing appropriate penalties for drivers or restaurants who default.
However in typical Silicon Valley fashion their business model is to screw everyone so I'm sure the restaurants and delivery drivers have equally little recourse when things go wrong or to provide feedback so bad/misbehaving actors are allowed to remain as long as it's not causing a problem for Uber.
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food
Not really. FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction nor takes a fee off the transaction amount itself.
> Do you mean delivery drivers refuse to pick up from there? How is that a customer's problem?
It's not (necessarily), but it's not the drivers' problem, either. It's the restaurant's problem—just like it's their problem if no customers want to do business with them because their food tastes bad, or if their suppliers refuse to do business with them because they're always late paying invoices, etc.
> That's a potential breach of contract between Uber and the delivery drivers.
You can't have a breach of contract for contracts you don't pick up... Or are you implying that you believe the relationship between Uber and their contractors is/should be one where the driver has to take every offer that Uber sends them? If so, are you a freelancer? How would you feel about an arrangement where, because you agreed to work with Marcy in Q2, then when Albert comes to you in Q3 and wants some work done, you have to take it no matter how bad Albert's offer is—e.g. one which very well might turn out to have you working for less than minimum wage—or without regard for whether you find Albert to be a loathsome, demanding prick?
> FedEx/USPS doesn't manage the customer relationship, doesn't broker the transaction
Neither do UberEATS drivers. That's the entire point of the metaphor. (Having said that, I misread your original comment, which other comments have pointed out.)
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food. They have no special powers here. Expecting one to refund "for" you is like having a mail person show up at your door and then berating them for the screwup of whatever business sent you the wrong thing, etc.
I'm not sure what this means exactly or how it's relevant. In these instances, it's not the driver's fault, it's Uber's fault. They are taking orders they can't fulfill and then denying refunds when you cancel until you figure out how to escalate it to a human who can do things other than press canned-response buttons.
> UberEATS drivers are like Fedex or USPS for food.
This is to be expected, but it's not clear how this is relevant to your parent given it appears to have been Uber customer-service agents directing them to cancel, not a driver.
I have probably used Uber Eats for 100+ times over the past two (pandemic) years, and I've maybe have my orders being messed up 3-5 times, each time refunded within the next ten minutes. YMMV.
That’s because you were refunded automatically without human intervention. This is what the author of the comment pointed out: once you do that too often in a short period of time, the bot assumes you’re scamming them and there’s no way to escalate that.
> Trouble is consumer protection law is decades behind where it ought to be.
Potentially, but on the other hand, card disputes are a thing and I'm baffled as to how little people know about them or have misunderstandings such as them only being available for credit cards (the law may give you extra protections there, but the standard Visa/Mastercard dispute rules apply equally regardless of whether it's debit or credit).
Just like Uber and similar Silicon Valley scum gets away with this because they have a monopoly and can do as they please, so do the card networks - and the card networks are on your side in this case, so use that to your advantage.
"I'm baffled as to how little people know about them or have misunderstandings such as them only being available for credit cards..."
Right, and reckon I'm no exception.
One of the principal reasons why we have democratic governments is that they are there for the protection of the citizenry.
The trouble is that by the time governments venture into these murky areas much damage has been done. Here, the problem is that no one has spelt out the details in advance —i.e.: what the ground rules are and the consequences if they are broken. Alas, governments are never proactive in many areas where they need to be.
There's just so much going on in modern life that we can't expect citizens to keep up with everything that's going on. We need short, actuate and informative one-liners that people can check before and or during any operation that they're involved in. This ought to be the role of government.
I don’t quite understand. Maybe Uber eats is different in asia to America. But in Taiwan when I raised issue with an order it goes to a chat. They asked for a photo. I sent. And they confirmed the issue and issued a refund.
In singapore there’s no Uber eats. But most popular is probably grab which is what I used. If I raised an issue with grab. I get a phone call. Explain to person over the phone and depending on the shop I get a new order or a refund.
The only time it’s difficult in singapore is some of the Indian food restaurants use their own delivery drivers, not the grab drivers. So there’s no status updates and any disputes must go with the restaurant directly. But when ordering it states the restaurant uses its own drivers so you can avoid ordering from them.
They only stopped refunding you? They completely banned my account and my wife's account. We're still not sure what we did and they won't explain to us. Even escalated on Twitter and communicated by email. All we were told is that they have a zero tolerance policy for fraudulent behaviour and that the decision was final. WTH?
I was blacklisted on Uber a few years ago when I reported a security vulnerability to them.
They said no such vulnerability existed. I sent them video. They said I must have been doctoring the video because they couldn't reproduce it. They then banned me.
This was in 2015.
They were then sued because the vulnerability apparently identified someone's affair[0].
I sent my email exchange with Uber to the attorney who sued Uber, letting them know that they were aware of the bug two years prior. You know, because no good deed goes unpunished.
I get by just fine with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
> I get by just fine with DoorDash and Grubhub these days, but both of those platforms have the same issues that UberEats does.
To get back to the original point, don't you think you would be better off saving as phone contacts the few restaurants you buy from, or maybe writing down the numbers on the fridge if you live with other people?
I was banned from Deliveroo because I guess I should just be happy to absorb the cost for ~20% of orders which arrived wrong instead of calling them out and asking them to do their job properly.
I got banned from Deliveroo for a similar reason. I was a heavy user (several times a day every day) and mistakes are bound to happen - I'd estimate that maybe 20% of my orders ended up having something wrong. I guess they just assumed that 20% is an acceptable cost that the users should bear despite all the fees they add (to both the user-facing price and the fees they charge to restaurants)?
Uber Eats wasn't much better and tried to still make me pay for delivery fees even when the only item in the order was wrong/damaged, but a chargeback quickly took care of that.
This is an open & shut case for a card dispute. I'm surprised there is any country in the world where taking money without delivery the promised goods is legal, but I guess the US legal system doesn't care.
It meant a much larger range of restaurants became available to me - I don't drive, and these restaurants would otherwise not get my business.
Uber Eats has often been very good about giving me refunds for restaurant screwups.
However they sent me an email after a string of restaurants fucking up orders - missing whole meals, or significant parts thereof. At the time, they didn't ask for any kind of supporting evidence, just click through the app and it would instantly refund you.
Then they sent me an email saying that they've detected an "unusual" number of problems, and that they'd like to remind me that fraud is illegal and they may take further action if they detect it. No way to appeal, no way to say "Hey, if you're going to subtly accuse me of being a fraud, at least let me have an opportunity to provide some information".
Uber Eats now (sometimes) asks for some evidence, and it apparently goes off to some human for review (or they just stick a ~30-90 minute delay timer on the processing queue to make it look like a human reviewed it).
Now, most restaurants around me no longer have their own delivery options, and direct you to Uber Eats or a whitelabelled service that just submits the order through Uber Eats or Menulog anyway.
There's a number of fake restaurants now listed on Uber Eats around me, even some chains of fake restaurants.
One of these fake-chains is operating out of low-quality hotel kitchens and is clearly heating up commercial cook-chill/frozen meals.
Another is operating out of a residential apartment building from someone's home (not a commercial kitchen).
Good luck trying to report these to Uber. They don't give a shit.
While I'm dumping these on Uber, they're unfortunately not the worst.
Menulog are IMO worse - they have all the same problems as Uber in terms of fake listings, but also work with restaurants that keep getting bad reviews to wipe out the bad reviews and re-list them as New.
All the business has to do is say they've been sold to new owners, delete the old listing and re-add and hey presto, those 500 1-star reviews saying you've got a shit product are turned into 30 5-star reviews about this amazing "new" restaurant, rinse and repeat every few months when business drops off.
Restaurant driver is not a highly paid or long term job, so I wouldn't expect the incidence of this is actually any lower amongst restaurant employed delivery drivers.
Like you say, it is a job, though, and not gig work. I don't know what it's like now or everywhere but I did delivery work in the pre-app era. I got an hourly wage, cash tips and one staff meal per shift. That's what often happens when you get employed by humans who have to look you in the face. They treat you like a human.
It would never have occurred to me to take bites out of customers food but if you see just how little these app drivers earn and consider how little loyalty they feel to any one restaurant or platform, it's kind of understandable.
Uber has been helpful a few times when restaurants wouldn’t. I had the worst sushi order of my life. Order was missing items, fish was stinky, just gross. I called the restaurant and they offered 10% off my next order. They wouldn’t even replace the missing orders or gross items.
It was so weird as this was about a $150 sushi order and the restaurant was fairly nice.
Uber refunded the meal immediately after seeing a picture.
because this kind of app gets built cheaply by a freelancer agency copy pasting the last app they did which followed a e-commerce template app that includes account creation
I’ve literally never bargained with the pizza joint, and I would get smacked in the face and thrown out on my ass if I did it in person. Are you kidding me?
As far as when there’s a problem, with the major food delivery app I use, I am refunded merely for asking. I’ve used it heavily during the pandemic and literally every problem was solved through the app.
> On the phone I just ask the guy what their best deal is in a large cheese and garlic knots and he gives it to me
damn, you're lucky. I remember a few phone calls a decade ago where some brand had a sale on burgers, but they had a policy of waiting for me to dictate the coupon code over the phone... ugh
Exactly, Just like going to a restaurant you visit regularly and the staff know you, you'll get better service and quicker food if you have a relationship with the people taking the order, and making and delivering the food.
Use an app for discovering new places and seeing what they offer and order direct by phone.
The problem with ordering direct by phone is that delivery companies have monopolized the market and make it unprofitable for restaurants to have their own delivery staff, so a lot of them no longer do.
As a customer I have the right to not order if it's crappy Uber delivery which IMO has way too many problems, and I exercise that right and let the restaurant know.
When I call the restaurant I ask them if they have their own delivery person, or if it's Uber. If it's Uber, I politely decline to order from them.
The author's point isn't a good one. You have an "account" regardless. Putting in your name and e-mail is near irrelevant since he indicated it might be reasonable to provide a credit card. Unless he can say, "Large Pizza for Pickup, I have a CC", which is usually the case. The only thing better about calling or app is dependent on when and how you want to pay.
I think this might differ if you're in the U.S or out, here in Europe often it is like this:
In the app/website you have an "account" that you get by entering data into form fields which takes a while, and which then gets stored into a database and is saved forever unless you go through some extra steps to make sure it doesn't which will be complicated by how well the app / website has been programmed to handle these potential extra steps (if at all)
On the phone you have an address that the guy writes down on the piece of paper for the delivery guy and is thrown out afterwards.
Possibly it is different in Europe. Here in the US, when you call in an order your address is also stored in a database forever and tied to your phone number. That is exactly why next time you call they already know your address.
In the US a few places I order from when you call they associate your phone number with an "account" on their POS system, which comes up automatically when you call. It gets created automatically the first time you call/order. It stores your name, address (if you get delivery), order history, and credit card number (if you pay by card).
My local in NYC does a booming cash business (they offer a hugely popular cash special on Tuesdays & if you pay cash, tax is “included” - I think charging tax on card orders is to cover their transaction fees? But maybe a bunch of this is unreported.)
They’re on apps, but they write your order on a paper ticket if you are a phone, pickup order and only take your name.
Worse, the app pretends to be an unrelated party when something goes wrong. "Sorry, you need to call the store. Look up their number, it's on the website." For me it doesn't add anything to the transaction, it only takes away.
The literal only reason I use the pizza app at all is for chains where I have no idea which store delivers to me. Rest of the time I've gone back to calling. Much faster that way.