Neighborhood shops are making their comeback on the web. SpesaRossa, the “glocal” answer to Amazon

Neighborhood shops have begun to take their revenge and are making a comeback. They are often slighted in favor of the large-scale retail stores, and used only for small, last minute purchases. Now, they are experiencing a “second life” because of the ongoing health emergency rule limiting travel, which is forcing many people to postpone their appointments at the hypermarkets. So, the shop around the corner has once again become a resource because there’s no long waiting in line, and people are re-discovering the “old” way of shopping. The so-called neighborhood shops are more important than ever today because they offer a valuable service to the community. So, it is not a surprise that many stores have started home delivery service. Their return to popularity is also merit of new technologies. As a matter of fact, online shopping within the same municipality has seen a real boom in recent weeks, reaching staggering figures. Nielsen registered an increase of 178.1% during Easter week alone. However, there was still the problem of connecting small shops to people at home, as well as managing orders, payments and deliveries. The person who helped out the small shopkeepers, and consumers, was Ivan Laffranchi, programmer and digital entrepreneur, who created a service to deal with the emergency linked to Covid-19 and assist “smart” stores to organize for online shopping. This is how SpesaRossa.it, the Italian platform for local online shopping, was created, which, in the midst of the Covid-19 health emergency, has received hundreds of orders in the few weeks operations have begun. Laffranchi set up the idea in just 48 hours and following the enormous interest in the “first emergency version", which has seen peaks of over 1.000 users a day, SpesaRossa has now released a second version capable of better promoting shopkeepers’ products, serving even more people and receiving certified reviews on the quality of the products.
The service originally started in Turin and is now rapidly expanding to other cities, such as Bologna and Naples. According to Laffranchi, the success of the platform is linked to how easy it is to use, both for the shopkeeper and the customer. “The shopkeeper receives the first order in less than three minutes, while the consumer doesn’t have to use e-mail or register to place orders. The platform was created to help shopkeepers deal with this serious crisis through rapid digital transformation. The platform includes butchers, food shops, market stalls of household products, fishmongers, pastry shops, craft beer producers, delicatessens, restaurants and nurseries that receive orders from their regular customers as well as new customers every day”.
The founder of SpesaRossa.it is cannot conceal his success, thanks to numbers that already include 70 active stores, +5% daily organic growth, dozens of orders managed every day, at an average time of 52 minutes to complete the order. You can order 24 hours a day then send feedback about the order you received after an hour. “This emergency project put in place to help shopkeepers might perhaps be the response of small local merchants to counteract competition from large marketplaces such as Amazon”. We will only truly understand whether the return to neighborhood shopping will be a lasting phenomenon or instead only a temporary step driven by need, when the emergency ends.