How Pizza My Heart Manages Third-Party Delivery Across 30 Locations with Shipday

Challenges before Shipday

Fully outsourcing delivery to third-party contractors solved some problems and created others. The biggest ones showed up exactly when the restaurant could least afford them: during the Friday night dinner rush.

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Long hold times on third-party support

When something went wrong with a delivery, a missing item, a confused dasher, a last-minute address change, the shift supervisor had to call DoorDash support to fix it. That meant 5 to 20 minutes on hold, then re-explaining the issue, then waiting for resolution. Spencer's stores run lean by design. California wages do not allow for spare bodies standing around. Twenty minutes off the floor during the dinner rush is a real operational hit.

"The problems never happen when it's slow. They always happen when it's busy."

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Refund friction

Getting refunds from third-party platforms was a process. Shift supervisors who had just finished a rough night, often the same night that triggered the refund request, had to find the time and energy to push it through. Refunds got skipped. The store ate the cost.

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No visibility into what customers actually thought

Once a dasher took the pizza out the door, the restaurant lost the thread. The crew did their part. Something went sideways en route. The customer got frustrated. The restaurant never heard about it, and lost the customer quietly.

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Large orders routed like small ones

Pizza My Heart's POS injected every delivery into the standard small-order channel. That meant an 18-pizza catering order sometimes got assigned to a regular dasher in a regular car. The dasher was not prepared for the volume, was not compensated for it, and the handoff went badly. Spencer flagged it and started thinking about a better solution.

Shipday became the layer between Pizza My Heart and its third-party drivers, taking on the dispatch and support burden that used to land on shift supervisors during the rush.

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Support that picks up in 90 seconds

When something goes wrong on a delivery, the manager messages Shipday's support team. Shipday handles the dasher conversation, the address change, the missing item, the refund request. What used to be a 5 to 20 minute phone call is now a 90-second text exchange. For a high-volume store like Santa Cruz, that adds up to 30 to 90 minutes a week reclaimed during peak service.

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Review collection that turned into customer recovery

Shipday's review request feature attaches to both delivery and takeout orders, asking customers to rate the experience and prompting happy ones toward a Google review. Within the first weeks of turning it on, Pizza My Heart saw weekly Google reviews jump to 2 to 3 times the previous rate, with a heavy skew toward five stars. The unhappy customers who would have stayed quiet, or worse, gone straight to a public review, now had a private channel to vent. Managers reviewed the inbound feedback and reached out to make it right.

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Large-order routing on day one

Shipday let Pizza My Heart set an order-size threshold that automatically routes catering orders to large-order fulfillment with vetted drivers and appropriate compensation. The feature DoorDash never built, Shipday set up immediately.

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Bird's eye view across 30 locations

Spencer can see message traffic, reviews, and delivery patterns across every store. The visibility surfaced a problem nobody had reported: a California law requiring customers to opt in to utensils and condiments meant the kitchen was systematically missing requested items. After identifying it through Shipday's review feed, Pizza My Heart put new systems in place. Complaints dropped to roughly 5% of their original volume.

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AI phone call for failed deliveries

When Spencer asked Shipday for a way to get notified the moment a delivery failed, Shipday built an AI agent that calls the store directly. The store starts a remake immediately instead of finding out 30 minutes later when the customer calls in. By the time the customer would have called, the replacement order was already on its way.