Dive Brief:
- Domino’s loyalty program and third-party delivery partnership with Uber contributed to strong order volume growths, executives said on a Q4 2024 earnings call Monday.
- The Domino's Rewards program, which relaunched in fall 2023 and quickly saw success, grew by 2.5 million members to 35.7 million users in 2024, according to CEO Russell Weiner.
- The pizza chain has developed a new e-commerce platform with customer experience in mind and plans to roll out the changes over the course of 2025, according to Weiner.
Dive Insight:
Domino’s leaders expect its loyalty and e-commerce investments to pay off in the long term.
“Loyalty is a multiyear gain for us, like we showed with the first loyalty program,” Weiner said during the call.
The company’s same-restaurant sales rose a sluggish 0.4% in the fourth quarter, while sales of food and drink were up 2.3% for U.S. locations, according to a company earnings report. Same-restaurant sales were up 3.2% for fiscal 2024.
A high share of carryout transactions, which produce lower tickets than delivery on average, contributed to the lower same-store sales in the fourth quarter, according to Sandeep Reddy, EVP and CFO at Domino’s.
However, the loyalty program is targeting “light users” and carryout customers to drive greater frequency, according to executives. While the growing number of carryout customers weighed on same-restaurant sales, they present an opportunity for future growth.
“The really cool thing about loyalty, the 2.5 million incremental loyalty members that we've gained, these are light users and carryout users,” Reddy said. “That becomes a huge flywheel, because now we've captured them into a database, and we can start marketing them to drive incremental compounding impacts.”
Domino’s reimagined e-commerce platform reflects changing consumer preferences. For instance, the carryout business “was kind of an afterthought” on the old website, while the new website improves the carryout experience, according to Weiner.
Weiner also expressed confidence in the speed and personalization capabilities of the updated website, as well as the updated food photography and layouts.
“People buy with their eyes first, and so I'm excited about that,” Weiner said. “We've taken steps out of the user flow, and things are much more intuitive.”
While Domino’s executives expressed excitement about the revamped site and app, updates are rolling out with care, according to Weiner. The company will launch the experience piece by piece, taking time to fix any aspects that don’t work.
“It's a huge website,” Weiner said. “So 0.1% of conversion loss is an issue. What we see in 2025 is this is going to be a year where we're rolling this out at [as] fast [of a] pace as we can to make sure we're continuing to support the business in the right way.”
