Nobody will make the effort.

A few days ago, walking my dog, I ran into a man and we started talking. He used to run a pizzeria, a real one, well known in his town, not a van in a car park. He'd just sold it. And as often happens when people learn what I do, we ended up talking about digital, platforms, delivery. What he told me didn't surprise me for a second, and yet it's the whole reality of retail today.

The pizzeria that delivered for free

His restaurant offered delivery. For free. You just had to call, order, and you were delivered without a single fee. No commission, no service charge, no supplement. The price of the pizza, full stop.

And yet a large share of his customers kept ordering through Uber Eats. The same pizzas, the same restaurant, but with delivery fees, service fees, a commission taken along the way. They paid more for exactly the same product, while the free option existed and they knew about it.

Why? The answer is one word, and it's the subject of this whole article: because it was easier. On the platform, you open the app, you see the menu in photos, you add to cart, you pay, you track the delivery. Calling means picking up the phone, maybe hitting a busy line, spelling out your address, repeating your order, not knowing how long it will take. More expensive but smooth beat free but tedious.

People chose to pay fees rather than make a phone call. That isn't laziness. That's the rule of the game now.

People go where it's easy

Don't look for someone to blame, there isn't one, and above all don't judge those customers. We're all exactly the same. Me first.

I sometimes order a two-euro item on Amazon, a pen, something I'd find in any shop five minutes from my home. Not because I'm lazy, but because in three clicks it's done and I move on. The shop next door lost a sale not on price, not on quality, but on the five-minute walk and the uncertainty of whether they had it in stock.

That's the uncomfortable truth: at comparable quality and price, people always choose the shortest path. Friction has become the real competitor. Not the neighbour, not the price: the effort. Every extra step, every second of hesitation, every "how do you do this again?" costs you customers you'll never see leave, because they simply never came.

Nobody pushes the door just to look

You have to accept something, even if it stings: the days when people strolled past shop windows are over. Nobody wanders through town looking at storefronts, stepping in "just to see", discovering a shop by chance. It still happens, a little, but it's no longer the dominant behaviour, and you can't build a business on it.

Today, people push a shop door for one reason: to collect or buy something they already decided to buy. Discovery no longer happens on the pavement. It happens on a screen, quietly, in the evening, on the sofa. That's where people look at what you do, compare, hesitate, decide. If there's nothing to look at, they look at someone else.

And for a good share of your future customers, that first look on a screen is the entry condition. Not a bonus, not a nice-to-have: the condition. If they can't see your menu, your products, your hours, your prices before travelling, many won't travel at all.

Expecting the effort is self-centred

I'll be a little harsh here, but it matters. Thinking people will make the effort to come to you to discover what you offer is deeply self-centred.

It amounts to telling yourself: my products are so good that people will find the time, travel, push the door, ask. But people don't have that time. They have busy lives, exactly like you, exactly like me. They won't organise their day around discovering your shop. They have kids to pick up, a job, a mental load stretched to breaking point. Your business, however good, isn't at the centre of their world. It's at the centre of yours, and that's normal, but don't confuse the two.

The worst part is that it shows. A business that makes no effort to make its customers' lives easier sends a message, even unintentionally: "adapt to me". And people feel it. They don't put it into words, they don't even resent you, they simply go where things were made easy. Making your customers' journey easy isn't a technical matter. It's a form of respect.

The question isn't "are my products good enough for people to travel". It's "am I making it easy enough to come to me".

The grocery that has waited a year

Second story, as true as the first. About a year ago, an Italian grocery contacted me for a quote. A small showcase site, the kind of project that runs between seven hundred and a thousand euros. I answered, I gave my rates, and then life did its thing: it never happened.

A year later, talking with a family member who runs the shop, I learn they still have no website. Still nothing. And the real question isn't the price of the site. It's: what did that year with nothing cost them?

Because I, for one, have heard of that grocery. But I don't know exactly what they sell, I don't know their products, I don't know their prices. And I've never walked in, simply because my life is full, like everyone's. I might have been a customer. I won't be, for lack of being able to take a look from my phone. Multiply my case by everyone who, like me, vaguely heard of them and never took the step.

The thousand-euro site looks expensive at signing time. But twelve months of customers who never came because they couldn't discover you, nobody puts that on a quote. That's the invisible cost, the one you never feel because you can't see what you didn't get. And it's by far the highest.

What Uber Eats understood before you

A word on the platforms, because this isn't black and white and it would deserve an article of its own. Uber Eats, Deliveroo and the others bring real value: a delivery logistics operation you can't build alone, visibility, a flow of orders. I'm not here to demonise them.

But look at what they understood, and what most businesses still refuse to face: they worked on the experience. Seeing the menu in photos, choosing calmly, adding, paying, tracking. They removed every bit of friction, one step at a time. That's exactly their product. Not the pizza: the simplicity.

And there's the real problem. By refusing to offer a simple experience themselves, restaurants didn't avoid digital: they outsourced it. They became dependent on platforms that take a commission on every order, that own the customer relationship, that know their habits in their place. The customer thinks they're ordering "from you", but they're really ordering from Uber Eats, which happens to sell your pizzas. Nobody chose that dependency. It settled into the void left by businesses that wouldn't take care of their own customers' experience.

Having your own interface doesn't mean leaving the platforms overnight. It means no longer depending on them one hundred per cent. Taking back a direct front door to your customers, where you set the rules.

And no, it isn't about money

"Yes, but it's expensive." That's the last line of defence, and it no longer holds.

Getting a digital storefront, an interface showing your products, your prices, your offers, where people can book or order, has nothing to do with the budgets of ten years ago. I regularly see businesses spend, without blinking, the equivalent of a full digital storefront on a batch of flyers that will end up in the bin, on business cards by the thousand, on printed material that returns nothing measurable. The same amount, put into a tool that works for you twenty-four hours a day, changes everything.

And careful, I'm not saying you must have online payment. It isn't mandatory. Your customers can order online and pay on site, that's your call. The heart of the matter isn't collecting money on the internet, it's to show and simplify: let people see what you do, and make the next step obvious. The rest is an option.

What this means for you

If you run a restaurant, a butcher's, a bakery, a pastry shop, a grocery, this isn't an article about fashion or modernity. Digitalising isn't about "doing what everyone else does", being trendy, being nice. It's for one very concrete reason: removing the friction between your products and the people who'd want them.

Concretely, the bare minimum looks like this:

• People can see your products. Your menu, your specialities, your prices, in photos, from a phone, without calling anyone.
• People know what to do, immediately. Book, order, collect, get delivered: the next step must be obvious.
• It's easier than going elsewhere. If ordering from you takes more effort than opening an app, you've already lost.

And to those thinking "I don't care, I already have my customers": that's exactly the mistake. Your current customers are the most precious thing you have. They already love you, they love your products. If you give them an even smoother experience, they'll order more often, more easily, and they'll discover products they didn't even know you had. You don't digitalise to chase strangers. You do it first so you stop tiring the people who already love you.

The world changed pace. Your products may not have changed, and good, that's your strength. But the way people decide to come to you has changed completely. You can't wait for them to make the effort anymore. It's up to you to remove it.