Pizza Hut goes cold on Web ordering

The Australian marketing director of Yum Restaurants International -- which owns the brand locally -- said the system's front end was old and unpopular.

"The reason we pulled it was that it was probably a couple of generations old in terms of the front end," Simon Sproule told ZDNet Australia.

"And it wasn't very consumer friendly. We thought until we could do better, to pull it out until we could update it."

"It was very unpopular. It was a very small percentage of transactions. And a lot of that had to with the fact that it was very clunky."

The system -- often utilised by ZDNet Australia -- allowed customers to place orders via the Web and kept a record of customers' previous orders so they could easily be repeated.

Sproule said it had been launched in 1999 or 2000.

But the executive said there was still a place for a replacement system.

"I think for the majority, the phone system is handier, but there's definitely a place for Web ordering," he said.

"Depending on where priorities lie, at some stage we'll consider re-opening it."