There’s a point where technology and marketing converge, where making something easier to do also makes it easier to persuade people to do it often. And among the nation’s retail food chains, the pizza category seems to be the hotbed of innovation.

That makes a certain sense. Pizza is much more likely to be home-delivered than either chicken or burgers, so the easier its players can make the ordering process, the more convenience-minded customers can be led to opt for pizza over those other choices—or over rivals’ pies.

This has led to something of an arms race in pizza with the top competitors looking to outdo each other in gimmicks and gadgets for getting that pizza hot and steaming to your door. The fight began with online ordering, which took off in either 1994 or 2001. (More on that in a moment.) It has since extended to SMS orders and the use of mobile WAP sites.

And in January of this year—just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, the Christmas season/ Mother’s Day of the pizza world–Domino’s introduced its online “Pizza Tracker”. In line with the chain’s “30 minutes or it’s free” offer, the Web-based feature lets customers keep tabs on their pizza’s progress from the dressing and baking through the delivery process—even providing the name of the delivery person. According to an Associated Press report, letting customers view their food’s journey online has afforded a good-sized sales bump for Domino’s.

Last week both Pizza Hut and Papa John’s chains upped the ordering ante with widgets that let will let users place their online orders without surfing to the companies’ Web sites.

Papa John’s downloadable myPapa applications are customized for a wide array of different Web placements, from the desktop to start pages in iGoogle or My Yahoo! to MySpace and Facebook. Customers can click on the pizza box widget icon and place an order that will be sent to their nearest Papa John’s location.

On the same day, pizza category sales leader Pizza Hut debuted the “Pizza Hut Shortcut” widget for Mac and PC desktops. The Dallas-based chain’s mini-app also lets customers order quickly, reorder stored favorites from a “Pizza Playlist” and build custom orders. Pizza Hut said the application will be used in future to drive store-wide deals and special offers from users’ local outlets.

Papa John’s maintains that offering a suite of widgets that can be placed wherever a customer spends the most time online will produce better sales results.

“For us it’s all about customer convenience and trying to find ways to be easily accessible within their lifestyles,” says Jim Ensign, vice president of marketing communications for Papa John’s International. “So whether they use a social networking site like Facebook or they’ve customized a home page on iGoogle, we wanted to be in as many of those places as possible.”

Both Pizza Hut and Papa John’s already let customers store and name a selection of their favorite pizza orders online, and both now make those favorite lists available in widget form.

Papa John’s widget appears to have the early lead as a promotional channel. If customers agree to opt in, the company will use RSS to stream up to a dozen discounts and product offers from Papa John’s franchisees in their area.

“That’s really key to the widget’s value,” Ensign says. “Once you’ve logged in and identified who you are and where you live, it stores that data for the purpose of providing you customized offers available at your local restaurant. These aren’t the national offers but the ones the local franchisees know their customers want, and rotating them through gives a sense of the range available at your nearby outlet.”

Right now the offers are generic and not based on individual consumers’ stored pizza history, he adds. That might be an upcoming option for shoppers who consent to have their buying tracked. “Personalization is the future of this feature,” Ensign says.

Phone sales still rule at the nation’s pizzerias, but online sales are becoming a crucial channel for the big national chains. Earlier this month Papa John’s announced that it reached $1 billion in online sales since it first started taking orders over the Internet in 2001. The company said Web purchases had grown 50% each year to reach $400 million in 2007 and that orders via the Internet or text message now constitute 20% of its sales mix.

Pizza Hut was quoted in a May 7 Associated Press report as saying that its online orders have grown six fold in the last three years, without giving dollar values.

Besides racing to roll out Web 2.0 ordering capabilities, the pizza rivals are also fighting for early-adopter credit for any innovations. For example, last Monday’s press release announcing Pizza Hut’s widget included a claim that it was the first to institute Web orders back in 1994.

Meanwhile Papa John’s widget release on the same day trumpeted its feat as the first national chain to offer “systemwide” online ordering in 2001.

“We know they still don’t offer online ordering throughout their system,” Ensign says. “So it’s taken them, what, 14 years and they’re still not where we are?” (To be fair, the systems are different sizes. Papa John’s has about 2,100 U.S. outlets, half of them company-owned, while Pizza Hut has almost three times that number and is about two-thirds franchised.)

The releases also pointed to the mobile phone as another battleground for bragging rights. Pizza hut claimed that it is the first chain to offer “total mobile access” by letting customers order pizza on their cell phones using either text messaging or a WAP site optimized for mobile.

But Ensign maintains that most people still rely on SMS as the easiest way to place a quick order, and he points out that Papa John’s was the first chain to incorporate text ordering last year.

“Upward of 50 million people can use text ordering, whereas only about 10% to 20% of customers even have mobile Web access on their phones, and a similar percentage actually uses it,” he says. “We just followed where the customers already were. And we did widgets the same way, offering a suite that they could use in a way that suits their online habits.”