How Should a Tucson Bakery Use Their Website to Boost Holiday Orders?
67% of consumers prefer ordering food online rather than calling. If your bakery doesn't have an online pre-order page by November, you're handing Thanksgiving pies to the bakery down the street that does. Your website should be your busiest order-taker during the holidays.
Holiday Bakery Orders Online
40% of holiday food orders come in the final week. If your website isn't taking orders at 10 PM, you're losing them.
Bakeries with online ordering report 20-30% higher holiday revenue
Let your website take orders while you bake.
A pre-order page with photos, prices and pickup dates, live by mid-October. The week before Thanksgiving is the week your phone is least able to be answered, because everybody who could answer it has their hands in dough. Every call that goes to voicemail during that week is an order that goes somewhere else, and none of it shows up anywhere you would notice. The National Restaurant Association puts 67% of consumers as preferring to order food online rather than call, and the customer deciding on the sofa at ten at night will place it right then if there is somewhere to place it.
November and December decide the year for most bakeries in Southern Arizona. The revenue is the obvious part. The quieter benefit is that pre-orders tell you on the Monday how many pies Wednesday needs, which is the difference between a hard week and a chaotic one.
What the Data Says About Holiday Bakery Sales
67%
Of consumers prefer ordering food online vs calling
$3.1B
Spent on Thanksgiving bakery items in the U.S. annually
40%
Of holiday food orders placed in the final week
6 wks
Ideal lead time for holiday pre-order campaigns
Should a Bakery Accept Online Pre-Orders for the Holidays?
Yes, and Toast's research on ordering trends now treats online ordering as the default expectation rather than an extra. Taking orders only by phone through the rush costs you twice, once in the orders missed and once in the person pulled off the line to answer the ones that got through. A form does that work quietly and at any hour.
You do not need a checkout with payment processing. Name, phone, items, quantities, pickup date. Five fields, an email to you, and a text back to confirm. Bakeries talk themselves out of this every year by imagining the complicated version and then building neither.
Anybody baking on 4th Avenue, along Campbell or downtown knows what the week before Thanksgiving does to a kitchen. Pre-orders spread the same volume across three weeks instead of three days. You know the pumpkin pie count on the Monday rather than guessing at six on Wednesday morning, and your bakers get a week they can plan.
Your website should take orders while you bake.
67% of customers prefer ordering online. The bakery with a website captures the 10 PM order. The bakery without one doesn't.
What Should a Bakery's Holiday Menu Page Include?
Every item needs a photo, a price, available sizes, and a direct path to order. Don't make customers call to ask how much a pecan pie costs.
Dedicated Holiday Menu Page
A separate page for your holiday offerings with photos, prices, and sizes for every item. Not buried in your regular menu. Front and center with a direct link from your homepage.
Online Pre-Order Form
Name, phone, items, quantities, pickup date. That's all you need. Customers fill it out at 10 PM on their couch. You wake up to a full order queue.
Deadline Banners
A countdown or clear date banner at the top of every page: 'Thanksgiving orders close November 20.' Urgency drives action better than any sales pitch.
Photo Gallery of Past Work
Show off last year's holiday spread. Custom cakes, pie boxes, cookie platters. Customers ordering for a family gathering want to see what they're getting before they commit.
Capacity Indicators
'Only 12 Thanksgiving pickup slots remaining.' This isn't a gimmick. It's honest inventory management that motivates early orders and prevents overbooking.
Pickup Instructions
Clear directions, parking info, and a pickup window. 'Pick up November 26, 8 AM to 12 PM at our 4th Ave location.' Remove every question that might delay an order.
Photographs sell this and text does not. "Pumpkin Pie, $28" is a line in a ledger. The same pie shot on a board with one slice gone is a decision. Deloitte's holiday research has consumers buying food more confidently when they can see it, which for a bakery means every pie, cake, platter and loaf on the holiday menu needs its own picture.
A photographer is not required. A window, a clear surface and a phone will do it, provided you shoot the thing as it comes out of the oven rather than at the end of the day. The steam and the color are most of the sale, and neither survives an hour on a rack.
We build these with a holiday gallery, prices on everything, and an order form attached to each item so nobody has to work out how to ask. The site is then handling the part of the job that happens after you have gone home, which during November is most of it.
Is Your Bakery Website Ready for the Holiday Rush?
Internet Crafters builds bakery websites in Tucson for $550 flat. Menu pages, pre-order forms, and a site that sells your baked goods 24 hours a day.
How Do Order Deadlines Increase Holiday Bakery Sales?
A banner reading "Thanksgiving pie orders close November 20" does more than any persuasion on the page, because the alternative to ordering is not ordering elsewhere, it is bookmarking you and forgetting. Square's research puts 40% of holiday food orders in the final week. A stated deadline pulls a good share of that forward into a week you can actually bake in.
This is not a pressure tactic, which matters if the idea sits badly with you. You have a finite oven and finite hands, and you genuinely need the orders by a date to plan around them. Saying so is a kindness. Nobody enjoys ringing on the 25th to be told there is nothing left.
Showing remaining capacity works alongside the deadline. "Twenty Thanksgiving pickup slots left" says two things at once, that other people are ordering and that waiting has a cost. It is only a trick if the number is invented, and for a small bakery with one oven and four people it is the truest number on the site.
Website With Online Ordering
- • Captures orders 24/7 including late nights
- • Shows exact pricing and availability
- • Handles capacity limits automatically
- • Reduces phone time during the rush
- • Customers can browse and decide at their pace
Phone-Only Ordering
- • Misses orders outside business hours
- • Staff tied up answering price questions
- • No way to show sold-out items in real time
- • Errors from taking orders while baking
- • Customers hang up if they're put on hold
40% of holiday orders come in the last week. Deadlines change that.
A visible cutoff date on your website converts procrastinators into early orders. That's better for your customers and better for your bakers.
How Can a Bakery's Website Handle Holiday Capacity Limits?
The simplest version is a form that closes itself once a pickup date fills. A Google Form with a response cap does this. So does a form on your own site with us marking a date sold out when you say the word. Neither needs software you would have to learn in November.
It also protects you from yourself. A bakery that takes two hundred orders and can bake a hundred and fifty has not had a good November, it has created fifty disappointed people, and those fifty write reviews in December that are still costing you customers in March.
Let them pick the day. Some want the pie Wednesday afternoon, some want it Thanksgiving morning, and offering the choice costs you nothing while spreading the baking across two days instead of one. Across Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year that is three rushes made survivable by a single field on a form.
Should a Tucson Bakery Use Social Media Instead of a Website for Holiday Orders?
Social gets you noticed and does not take orders. A photograph of the holiday cookie platter earns comments from people who will not order, and that is fine, because its job is pointing somewhere. Every post, update and Nextdoor mention should carry the link to the holiday menu.
Taking orders through DMs turns whoever is baking into a customer service desk, answering the same question about pie sizes forty times between other tasks, and getting one of them wrong at some point because they were holding a tray. A menu with prices and a form answers all of it once, correctly, and keeps answering at midnight.
The website or social question resolves the same way in every trade, which is both, doing different jobs. One is the billboard and one is the counter. We build the bakery site so it sits behind your Instagram rather than competing with it.
About six weeks out, so the second week of October for Thanksgiving. Google Trends has people searching "Thanksgiving pie order Tucson" from mid-October, and the first bakery with a live page takes those orders more or less uncontested, because most kitchens are still thinking about it.
Do not wait until it is finished. Five items and a form in October beats a complete, photographed, beautifully written page on November 15th, because by then the people planning ahead have ordered. The customer hosting eleven relatives flying in from Ohio booked her pies three weeks ago, and if it was not from you it was from Costco.
The Holidays Won't Wait. Neither Should Your Website.
Internet Crafters builds bakery websites for Tucson businesses that turn holiday traffic into pre-orders. Menu pages with photos, online order forms, deadline banners, and a site that sells while you bake.
$550 flat rate. No monthly fees. No contracts. Ready in 2-3 weeks. Your next Thanksgiving pie customer is searching right now.
Steve Bullis
Steve Bullis is the founder of Internet Crafters, a Tucson web studio building flat-rate websites for local businesses. He's been helping Arizona small business owners get online since 2005.
Sources
National Restaurant Association - Restaurant Technology Landscape 2024
restaurant.org
American Bakers Association - U.S. Baking Industry Market Data
americanbakers.org
Toast - Online Ordering Statistics for Restaurants 2024
pos.toasttab.com
Square - Holiday Season Trends for Small Food Businesses
squareup.com
Google Trends - Bakery Near Me Search Patterns
trends.google.com
Deloitte - Holiday Retail and Food Spending Survey 2024
www2.deloitte.com
External links open in a new tab. Internet Crafters has no affiliation with these publications.