Domino's sells £1m of pizza over the net in a week

Pizza takeaway chain Domino's Pizza has broken the £1m in a week milestone for online sales in the UK. Last year the company took online sales of £23 million. Since then, it launched a service offering pizza ordering over SMS.

At the beginning of the month, the chain reported 15 per cent of total delivered sales went through its internet channel and revealed it had broken the £200,000 sales in-a-day barrier.

The current milestone further demonstrates the applicability of takeaway food to ecommerce.

Domino's Pizza UK marketing director Robin Auld told silicon.com online sales are growing much more quickly than the company expected, currently at a rate of 50 per cent year-on-year. The two main drivers for this are customers' willingness to embrace new technology and the widespread accessibility to broadband internet services.

He said: "We are confident that online sales will continue to grow. Some stores are seeing 30 per cent of their orders coming through from the internet. The growth in online sales for us obviously has implications on how we allocate staff and where we locate stores in the future. It calls into question the necessity for high street locations, for instance and there is a great deal of planning activity around this issue at the moment."