"Mi Piaace" how to transform an idea into a winning project

“Mi Piaace” was born as a food delivery platform to order lunch and dinner online at home and has recently become a platform for ordering different types of services and products.

Challenge

The idea came from ​​a young entrepreneur from Varese who wanted to create a platform for home food delivery for his city.

The most important thing to keep in mind was that the platform had to be easy to use and had to coordinate restaurant owners, riders, and end customers with a few clicks.

Solution

The project is based on the idea outlined by the founder, drawn on a large sheet of paper with all possible interactions.

Weblink, a historical Digital Factory in Varese (Northern Italy) and the nopCommerce partner was assigned the task to move the idea on paper to a digital platform.

The initial phase of analysis which involved various professionals in the technical and creative departments of Weblink, led to nopCommerce as the platform of choice. The underlying service is eCommerce, as users buy meals, so the choice of nopCommerce is meaningful, but the customization required to implement all the features and interactions required was heavy.

nopCommerce was installed and customized with the development of specific features to enable the special services.

Here is some requested customization:

• Custom email templates after the orders
• Custom SEO (for city tags and for different types of business)
• Searches: limited to geographical areas (the customer must see only shops or restaurants close to his home)
• Delivery cost management: designed ad hoc
• Order management: flow to get to the checkout, selection of time slots for the order, menu management (categories and sub-categories) designed ad hoc

After several months, the first version of www.mipiaace.it was born and started to deliver its services.

The organizational part should not be underestimated. Moving such a complex "machine", made up of incoming orders, relations with restaurants, management of riders delivering meals and timetables to be respected, requires a management platform carefully designed to reduce the error margin to zero and guarantee a correct distribution of resources even in times of big flow of orders. For this reason, riders and restaurant owners have special mobile apps connected to nopCommerce, which are of fundamental importance for the management of their work.

Result

Mi Piaace today is no longer just a local food delivery platform, customers can order any type of product (medicines, household products, body products…) and the operations have expanded abroad.

The monthly order number has increased year over year: recently it reached the run rate of about 10,000 managed orders and the platform has more than 300 partners. Mi Piaace is active in 15 different areas between northern Italy and Switzerland, and it is about to expand further into other cities.

Weblink daily supports Mi Piaace, as the platform is constantly evolving, for new implementations on nopCommerce, helping to offer a quality service to all users on the platform.

Starting a new, ambitious project is never easy, but Mi Piaace is proof that a winning project can be born from a simple idea, a lot of determination and the help of competent and professional people. Weblink supports every type of company with passion and competence, from startups to multinational companies, using all the experience that, over the past twenty-five years, has made it a reference point for digital developments in Italy.