In order to reduce to a minimum the necessary displacement of people and boost local commerce, the Associação Comercial de Braga (ACB), InvestBraga, through Startup Braga, and the Municipality of Braga have joined the project Quietinho em Casa, born from the movimento Tech4Covid19.

Available for about a week, the Quietinho em Casa platform gathers information about commerce with home deliveries, explaining how the services can be used. Pharmacies, supermarkets and restaurants are some of the establishments that are part of the aggregator of commercial spaces of first necessity with home deliveries. For Braga, the project, born within the movimento Tech4Covid19 , designed a pilot dedicated exclusively to local commerce, allowing a quick consultation of available services through the selection by category and location.

With 53 registered stores from Braga, the initiative aims to bring local commerce closer to the community, revitalising it at a time when the health authorities are asking for all non-essential travel to be avoided. In this way, the entities involved intend to encourage the people of Braga to use the services with home deliveries.

"Even with the current limitations, it is important to maintain the economic activity, thus safeguarding the safety conditions for professionals and customers, so online commerce proves to be an excellent solution, in line with the measures taken since the first hour by the Municipality," argues Ricardo Rio, Mayor of Braga.

"Bringing local consumers closer to their commerce was the motto for this partnership, which aims to create a credible and reliable alternative to large-scale distribution for home shopping. We believe that with this platform we are promoting a socially responsible behaviour of the whole community with local commerce", defends Rui Marques, general director of ACB, who recognises Quietinho em Casa as a good option, both for traders and consumers.

Carlos Silva, Invesbraga, defends that "these platforms make it possible to make traditional commerce profitable and dynamic, preparing and training these structures for the change that lies ahead, of taking their products and services to people's homes".

Luís Rodrigues, director of Startup Braga, highlights the agility with which the pilot was implemented to support local commerce in Braga. "This is yet another initiative born out of the movimento Tech4Covid19, which brings together more than 4,300 volunteers, mostly connected to the technological and startups community. When we learned about the project, we immediately challenged its promoters to develop the necessary configurations to make the platform available at a local level, starting in Braga. It was extraordinary the acceptance that the challenge deserved and the speed with which this pilot advanced", he says.

Quietinho em Casa, besides facilitating the search for segmentation of commercial spaces with home delivery, provides video tutorials of the main delivery services, in order to massify the use of the platform, eliminating barriers often associated with the little practice of consumers with online shopping.

This pilot is added to the Quietinho em Casa project, which is part of the movimento tech4COVID19, created by a group of founders of the Portuguese technological community that is creating technological solutions that help the population to overcome the challenges launched by the pandemic.