The Quiet Slide

A burger and pizza shop selling through a food delivery app looked steady on sales. The story underneath was not.

Over six months, orders fell about 37%, from roughly 10,500 a month to 6,600 across both products. Sales fell less, down 23%, because the average order rose 23%, from about RM 30 to RM 37. The shop was serving fewer customers and charging each one more, mostly by cutting discounts.

That gap is the trap. A sales figure that holds while orders fall hides a shrinking customer base. The shop had, in effect, already tested the "fewer orders, bigger baskets" idea: the average order rose 23%, yet sales still fell 23%, because losing 37% of the orders swallowed the gain whole. Chasing a few high-value customers was not a strategy here; it was the path that cost about a fifth of the sales.

Splitting the drop into its parts showed why. Menu views fell about 22% and the ordering rate, the share of views that become orders, fell about 24%. Both real growth levers were weakening at once, and the bigger baskets were only a cushion. The biggest leak sat at the very first step: out of about 62,700 menu views in June, only a quarter reached the cart.

The relationships added the warning. Discounts and orders moved almost in lockstep, so cutting discounts cut orders directly. Ad payback fell from about 7.6 to 4.6 for burger and 12.8 to 6.9 for pizza, while the cost to win a new customer roughly doubled. Still profitable today, but the safety margin is shrinking.

The recommendation is to rebuild the ordering journey first, fix the menu-to-cart step, then lean less on discounts and ads, before the basket cushion runs out.