Your local digital city centre (2024)

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COVID-19 - We are here for you

Downtown is a ´digital city centre’ that brings frequency and reach to communities and retail organisations. This provides direct and uncomplicated support for offline retailers in the Corona crisis. The technology behind Downtown offers a functional sales and delivery infrastructure for your entry into digital commerce. As a non-commercial project, Downtown can be used completely free of charge by all interested cities, municipalities and organisations as well as by retailers and customers.

For Retailers

As a result of shop closures required during the Corona crisis, many local retailers saw their sales disappear through no fault of their own. Downtown offers offline retailers the technical infrastructure and the commercial opportunity to make their product ranges digitally visible and available quickly and in an uncomplicated way, so that they can still be reached by their customers.

For Customers

The loyalty and trust that customers have towards their local retailers has remained high during the Corona crisis. What Downtown does is to offer consumers the opportunity to take a digital shopping trip to their own city centre. There they can find all the relevant information about their local retailers and the products that they offer. They can also do targeted searches for products and simply and quickly contact retailers.

For Communities

Cities, municipalities & associations can use Downtown's technical platform to ensure the visibility of regional organisations and retailer communities in the Corona crisis. Starting with an overview of all local suppliers within an organisation and direct contact between dealers and consumers, up to the operation of a complete marketplace - everything is possible.

How does Downtown work?

Are you curious to know how Downtown works and looks? Then click on the video below. There Claudia explains why we developed Downtown and how it can be used to quickly help retailers during the coronavirus crisis.

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Bolzano’s digital marketplace is online

Bolzano in Italy is the first city to go online with a digital marketplace based on Downtown. This not only prepares Bolzano’s merchants for another lockdown, but can also be seen as a response to the growing influence of Amazon. The web agency teamblau initiated the project and worked closely together with the marketing group BZHEARTBEAT.

To the digital marketplace

How can I use Downtown?

Downtown is completely open and available for use free of charge. If you are a community, city, organisation or association and would like to use Downtown for yourself, please contact us.

At present the infrastructure is for use by developers, who can start using the platform immediately. We are also evaluating the possibility of offering the Downtown project as a ready-to-use cloud service and will keep you informed on our progress.

Get in contact

How can I support?

As a charitable project, Downtown exists thanks to the developer community that sits behind the initiative and takes care of its further development. Downtown is freely available for you on Github. If you are a developer or designer we invite you to join our Slack Channel, where you can get involved in further development. If you have general questions, please send us an e-mail to info@shopware.com.