Search Results and Social Media get more Transactional

Within a week of Google announcing that you would be able to order food delivery from search results, Twitter announces a collaboration with Domino’s - where customers can order Pizza by tweeting a specific pizza emoji. It’s not quite as dazzling as it sounds, as it really only allows frequent customers to re-order their standard / default order. Compared to going through the usual 5-6 step checkout though it’s one slick shortcut.

Google’s service is a collaboration (currently US only) with Seamless, Grubhub, Eat24, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu and MyPizza.com. The mechanic is that someone who searches for one of the participating restaurants gets an additional option in the search results to ’Place an order’ - this then routes via one of those restaurant delivery services and clicks on through to the order menu.

As all consumer psychologists will tell you - speed is always of the essence, as the longer you give your customers to think about things, the more likely they are to change their minds. People often walk away from a store or checkout if some complication, incidental or other delay arises. The quicker you can transition a consumer desire into a purchase, then the higher the conversion rate will be.

This also feeds more into wearable devices with more restrictive real estate, and where consumers would not have the patience for a multi-step process. The quicker and easier you can accomplish something, the more likely that is to work as a service. I look forward to seeing more advances on this front in the near future. I use Google and Wikipedia several times a day, and for them to find new ways to fund their free services is a fair exchange for me ...