Upon hearing the news that Taco Bell customers can now order and pay for food online by way of a new website, you might have some questions: Doesn’t Taco Bell already have an app for ordering and paying ahead? And doesn’t it already have a website? Yes and yes, but now the two things have become one.

Before now, customers who wanted to order and pay ahead of time had to use the Taco Bell app on their smartphone. With today’s launch of the “new” website — ta.co, which is pronounced “tah-dot-co” and reroutes to the old site, tacobell.com — customers can order online wherever they can get to a web browser, without having to add yet another app to their mobile device.

Just like with the app, customers can customize their orders, adding beans to tacos, guacamole to Mexican pizza and cheese to anything and everything because cheese belongs on as many menu items as imagination allows.

So what’s with the trendy ta.co name? It’s not like it’s that much shorter than simply the name of the chain. It’s like shorthand, Tressie Lieberman, Taco Bell vice president of digital innovation and on demand told Nation’s Restaurant News.

“It’s like using an emoji,” Lieberman said. “We think ease is the new loyalty.”

Unfortunately for Taco Bell, there is no taco bell emoji, which could allow customers to actually order with an emoji like Pizza Hut does with the pizza emoji.

Next up, Lieberman said, will be integrating a new loyalty program into the site, which will debut late this year. Perhaps mobile punch cards with a free taco every 50th taco? Because that’s not really that many tacos if you’re dedicated.

Taco Bell launches online ordering and payment [Nation’s Restaurant News]

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