Waldis Pizza Shop: From hobby baker to pizza pro with JTL and PayPal

Sebastian Maletzke, better known as Waldi, has a weakness for pizza – especially when it’s handmade! He has become so good at it himself that he shares recipes and tips for perfect preparation on his YouTube channel. With Waldi’s Pizza Shop, he has also created a virtual paradise for all those who want to do the same. Here, lovers of the Italian specialty can find all the ingredients and accessories they need.

In this blog post, you can find out how Waldi managed to go from hobby baker to successful online retailer and pizza pro with the support of JTL and PayPal Checkout.

In the beginning was the wood-fired oven

It all started over ten years ago with his parents’ wood-fired oven, in which he regularly prepared pizza for his friends. “Although my pizza looked different back then, it went down very well with my friends,” recalls the trained carpenter and wood technician. From 2017 onwards, he drove to company parties and weekly markets to delight his customers with freshly baked pizza – in typical Italian Piaggio Ape food truck style. Meanwhile, his passion took him to Naples, the birthplace of pizza, several times, where he collected many ideas and decided to share them with others. In 2019, he founded his YouTube channel “Waldis Pizza”, which now has over 96,000 subscribers.

From street sales to the online store

Given the great interest shown by the YouTube audience, the requests for cooperation from oven manufacturers and delicatessens were not long in coming. Spurred on by this positive feedback and the demand from his growing pizza community, he finally decided to open his own online store: Waldis Pizza Shop. Here, his viewers would be able to order all the products from the videos – from the right flour to the pizza oven. The connection between his YouTube tutorials and the online store proved to be the perfect combination and struck a chord with many pizza lovers. The success was so overwhelming that he has now turned his hobby into a profession and works full-time as a pizza professional.

JTL-Shop as a game changer

When deciding on an online shop system, Waldi’s main question was which solution would not only allow him to set up an appealing and customer-friendly store, but also to cope with a large order volume and warehouse management. Through a recommendation, he finally came across JTL-Shop in combination with JTL-Wawi. With the store system and merchandise management, he can centrally control all processes relating to his online trade. The automation functions contained in JTL-Wawi also save a considerable amount of time and resources.

It’s just great that JTL-Wawi works so well with my store. JTL-Packing Table+ is also a great time saver for us!

Thanks to the active support of JTL service partner rshost.eu and the easy handling of JTL-Shop with OnPage Composer, Waldis Pizza Shop was up and running in no time. The range quickly grew from 50 to 180 items. Waldi is particularly enthusiastic about the seamless connection to the merchandise management system: “For me, it’s just great that JTL-Wawi works so well with my store. The fact that I can automatically trigger orders is great! In addition to JTL Shop and JTL Wawi, my team and I also use JTL Packing Table+, which saves us the most time. This means we can handle significantly more parcels – much to the delight of our customers. And if, for example, something is not immediately available, I can use JTL-Wawi to conveniently inform the relevant customers via a collective email.”

Success factor PayPal Checkout

The checkout process, which is so important for the conversion rate, can also be made clear and customer-friendly with JTL-Shop. A decisive factor is the range of available payment methods. Waldi attached particular importance to being able to integrate PayPal as a convenient and secure payment method right from the start: “This was important to me, as I myself pay a lot of attention to being able to pay with PayPal when shopping online. And JTL-Shop made this implementation very easy.”

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More information about the campaign

The switch from PayPal PLUS to PayPal Checkout also went smoothly via the JTL service partner rshost.eu, who had recommended the upgrade. “I was impressed by PayPal Checkout’s significantly wider range of functions – more payment methods and smoother processes. The switch took no more than 15 minutes. It’s simply practical to have everything from a single contractual partner with PayPal Checkout. And the customer feedback shows me that I made the right decision with PayPal Checkout. Especially with my higher-priced products such as pizza ovens, the ‘pay later’ options ‘pay after 30 days’ and PayPal installment payment are very popular,” says Waldi.

Around 88 percent of his customers opt for PayPal as a payment method, partly because it eliminates the need to create a customer account and thus removes a crucial hurdle before completing a purchase. The combination of JTL Shop and PayPal Checkout has enabled Waldi to increase its turnover with PayPal by 39 percent.

On an expansion course - around the world with the perfect pizza

The passion for pizza knows no borders, which is why Waldi wants to supply the whole of Europe with ingredients for the perfect pizza in the future – Luxembourg, France and Poland are set to be the first countries. It will be helpful that PayPal Checkout offers ten local payment methods. JTL-ShippingLabels is also exactly the right product for his international plans. Nothing stands in the way of expanding the customer base beyond national borders.

Waldi’s success story shows that the choice of systems involved is a key factor – just as the quality of the ingredients determines the taste of an enjoyable pizza.