How Sotto turned website visitors into a third of their orders

Affordable, authentic, and very busy

Sotto makes Neapolitan pizza that's actually affordable. On a busy shift, Mikko Aitto-oja, co-founder of Sotto, and his team handle 80 to 90 customers an hour with two or three people in the restaurant. It is that kind of place. Fast, full, and built around getting good food to people without making them pay through the roof for it.

Anything that disrupts that goes against everything Sotto is about.

People were finding Sotto online. There was no way to order. 

Last spring, Mikko noticed a pattern in the website traffic. People were landing on the Sotto site, spending time on the menu, and leaving without ordering.

Without a way to order online, people called the restaurant instead. During a packed shift, the phone is one more thing competing for attention. The team was missing around 100 calls a weekend, not because nobody cared, but because two people running a full kitchen can't always stop to answer.

The ordering setup they had at the time made things worse. "Our old system used to freeze. It really wasn't easy to use for the customer or for us," says Mikael Jokinen, Partner at Sotto.

Mikko knew something had to change. He also knew exactly what that couldn't mean.

"The most important thing is that I don't want to make trouble for my employees in the restaurant. The workflow has to be smooth," says Mikko Aitto-oja.

Why Wolt Storefront made sense

Sotto had been working with Wolt through the Marketplace for years. Mikko had seen firsthand what that experience looked like for customers, and it mattered to him.

"We have very good experience with Wolt ordering, the workflow and how it's integrated. That's what we wanted to offer to visitors from our website as well," says Mikko Aitto-oja.

When he came across Wolt Storefront, the appeal was practical. Storefront lets restaurants take orders directly through their own website and other online channels, with Wolt handling payments and order tracking in the background. For the kitchen, orders come in exactly like any other Wolt order. Nothing new to learn, nothing new to manage.

"Because we already had the Wolt system built in, there was nothing new to learn in the restaurant. The workflow already existed. There were no changes," says Mikko Aitto-oja.

Up and running in a few weeks

A few weeks after the first conversation with Wolt, Sotto was live with paying customers ordering through their website. Mikko added the ordering link to his existing channels too, Meta, TikTok, and Google, and started pointing people there instead of to the phone.

What changed for Sotto

For customers, ordering became simple. No account to create, Apple Pay and Google Pay at checkout, and order tracking once the payment is done. Wolt handles customer support in the background too, so any issues are taken care of without the restaurant getting pulled in.

"That surprised me the most. How well the communication with the customers is built into the system," says Mikko Aitto-oja.

For the team, the biggest change was the drop in phone calls. Sotto had always been a place people called to place pickup orders. During a busy day, that meant someone constantly stepping away from the kitchen to answer. As more customers started ordering online, the team could focus on making the food and looking after the people in the restaurant.

A third of all orders, and three new restaurants

One in three of Sotto's orders now comes through Wolt Storefront. That share came from traffic that was already there, just with nowhere to go.

Over the same period, Sotto grew from four restaurants to seven. Because Storefront orders run through the same system the team already uses, opening new locations didn't mean rebuilding any process or retraining anyone.