BD2M Digital Enablement — ecommerce, communications and operations

Marketing site

Before anyone sees a price, they need to understand what kind of place this is. The homepage earns that — dark surfaces, the bottega’s green and yellow, product photography that makes the Nebrodi feel close. «Mangia sano… Mangia Siciliano», the family story since 1970, the distinction between the Capo d’Orlando shop and the online store that ships across Europe.

It earns the order before asking for it. By the time a visitor reaches the catalogue, they already know who they are buying from.

The problem

A wheel of provola does not weigh the same as the next one. A portion is cut to order. The price on the product page is a price per kilo, and the piece the customer will receive does not exist yet.

A standard “pay now” checkout would charge the wrong amount. The bottega needs to take a request, weigh, confirm the real price, and only then send a payment link — or refuse, if the piece is unavailable. Shipping might wait until the customer says when the parcel should leave.

The design problem was making that hand-run process feel obvious to the customer — and giving the shop a clear action for every step of it.

Storefront UX

The storefront carries the same visual identity as the marketing homepage — the bottega’s green, yellow accents, near-black surfaces. Nothing changes on the way from brand story to product page. The site runs in Italian, English and German.

The hardest UX problem is on the product page itself. The customer needs to pick a cut — 250 g, 500 g, a whole piece — see an honest price estimate, and add it without committing to a charge. The button says “Aggiungi alla lista”, not “Buy”. Because this step is a request.

The cart is the shopping list, and it says so. A persistent notice explains that weights vary and that every price shown is an estimate — the shop will confirm the real amount before any money moves. Checkout runs in four steps: shopping list, order details, order sent, order ready. Delivery or pickup.

Experience reasoning

Every decision in the interface traces back to one fact: the shop does not know the weight until it cuts the piece. That constraint drives the customer path, the order states, and the automation layer. These three diagrams make the reasoning explicit.

Purchase orders and email

Nothing is charged at checkout. The gateway is labelled “Pagamento alla conferma” because that is exactly what happens — the order lands as a request the shop can confirm, refuse, or hold.

From the admin order screen the shop can:

• Send the confirmed purchase order to the customer, with accept and reject links
• Refuse a new request and notify the customer
• Send a payment reminder after the customer has accepted
• Resend the matching emails when needed

Each status change reaches the customer as a branded email — not a WooCommerce default notice. The customer opens a signed page to accept, modify or cancel the confirmed order. The whole decision path runs through the inbox.

I built the HTML email system from scratch — YITH quote overrides and custom Bottega templates. The shop manages the full order lifecycle from the inbox: the initial estimate, the confirmation where the real weight price sits next to the struck-out estimate, the refusal, the payment reminder with a secure link, payment received, shipped, pause when stock is short, holiday windows, and cancellation. Italian is the source language; English and German follow.

Mobile UX

Most orders come in on a phone. The same flow holds — pick a cut, see an estimate, add to the list, send the request — and the constraint of a small screen made every element earn its place.

Shop operations

Paying doesn’t mean the order ships immediately. The bottega decides when. The customer gets an email with signed links — ship now or postpone — and the order waits for their reply. If the shop goes on holiday, new requests get an automatic notice without blocking checkout.

Packlink handles the carrier side: door-to-door delivery, goods insurance, and a delivered status that matches how the bottega tracks parcels.

Every edge case — hold, pause, holiday window, shipping delay — was designed so a small team can manage the whole store by hand, without improvising outside the system.

Automations and AI

A Telegram bot is the control room. Commands route into n8n workflows; the team never touches the backend directly.

Product publishing from chat

A photo in Telegram starts a product draft. Gemini proposes name, category, price and variants. One approval and it’s live on WooCommerce.

Content and social

A brief or a catalogue item becomes a multi-channel post: AI copy, Gemini images, optional Veo video — reviewed on Telegram via the BD2M Automatron bot and staged in Notion, then scheduled to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Telegram and the blog. A separate poller tracks Veo jobs through to reels and posts.

Product imagery

Consistent, appetising photography is a real cost for a small artisan producer. For the Bottega, Gemini generates campaign visuals and product imagery directly from catalogue briefs — product name, category, mood reference. The output is cropped and refined in Figma before it goes anywhere. Marketing assets that used to need a photoshoot come out of a Gemini pipeline — same brand palette, same tone, at catalogue scale.

Contacts and newsletters

WhatsApp and Messenger contacts land in a shared store for approved chat broadcasts. Weekly newsletters pull from the catalogue, generate multilingual copy with Gemini, wait for approval on Telegram via the BD2M Automatron bot and in Notion, then send through MailPoet in Italian, English and German.

Leads

A separate pipeline finds B2B and HORECA contacts, scores them and drafts follow-up sequences. Sending is off by default until someone reviews.

Outcome

The bottega can now take orders online the same way it always took them in person — by hand, at honest prices. Customers know they are not paying until the piece is cut. The shop has a clear action for every step: confirm, refuse, hold, ship, postpone.

Publishing, social, newsletters and leads run from Telegram through n8n, reviewed before anything goes out. One person, or two, can manage the whole operation — online sales, marketing, and customer communication — without getting buried in admin.