Two-sided rental marketplace
Bittengo
A two-sided vehicle rental marketplace for Switzerland and Italy, where rental companies and private owners list cars and vans, and customers find, compare and request a rental in Italian — on their phone, in under a minute.
- Client
- Bittengo SAGL
- My role
- Frontend & backend development, SEO
- Status
- Live
- Stack
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- Stripe
The challenge
What the business needed
Renting a car in Ticino usually means calling around or paying a big platform’s commission. Bittengo set out to connect local rental companies and private owners directly with customers — tourists and locals alike — in their own language.
That’s two products in one: a listing tool simple enough for a small rental business, and a search-and-request flow fast enough for someone standing at a train station with a phone.
What I built
The main features
Search & categories
Find a vehicle by keyword or location (Mapbox), or browse categories, brands and offers — city cars, SUVs, vans, electric and more.
Vehicle pages
Hourly and daily prices with included kilometres, full specs, accessories and the rental policies spelled out.
Rental requests
Pick dates on a calendar and send a request straight to the owner — no account needed to ask.
Free listing for partners
Rental companies and private owners can register and list their fleet without upfront cost.
Destination pages
Lugano, Bellinzona, Locarno and Ascona each get their own entry point for local searches.
WhatsApp & contact
Customers reach support the way people in Switzerland and Italy actually prefer — including WhatsApp.
Google Reviews & FAQ
Real Google reviews and clear answers on the site, so first-time renters can trust a marketplace they’ve never used.
Partner subscriptions
Plans paid through Stripe Checkout — upgrade, downgrade, cancel or reactivate, retry a failed payment and change the saved card from the account.
Promoted listings
Partners buy promotion units into a wallet and apply them to individual vehicles, with a full promotion history.
Swiss & Italian billing
Billing addresses for Switzerland and Italy with VAT numbers (UID / Partita IVA) copied to Stripe invoices, plus receipt emails.
Screens
The live site
Screenshots of public pages, taken from the live website. Select one to enlarge.
Tech stack
What it’s built with — and why
- Next.js + React
- Fast listing and vehicle pages that work well on phones and are readable by search engines.
- Node.js API
- Handles listings, partners and rental requests in one place.
- MongoDB
- Vehicles vary a lot — flexible documents fit specs, prices and policies.
- Stripe
- Checkout, subscriptions and invoices, with webhooks that keep each partner’s plan status in sync with the app.
SEO & performance
Getting found
I planned a 57-item technical SEO roadmap for the marketplace and I’m working through it. The focus is the basics search engines read first: canonical URLs, a dynamic sitemap, a unique title and description for every page, the right language signals for an Italian-speaking audience, and Vehicle/Offer structured data so listings and locations are understood properly.
Destination and category pages are the long-term opportunity — they match how people actually search, like “noleggio auto Lugano”.
- Per-page titles & descriptions
- Language signals (Italian)
- Structured data for listings
- Location & category pages
Outcome
Where it stands
Bittengo is live in Ticino with listings from rental companies and private owners. The SEO overhaul is ongoing.
Client project — source code is private. I share what the business needed, what I built and how. The code belongs to the client.
Find out how many bookings your website could be taking directly.
Send me your website for a free check. I’ll look at how people find you and how easy it is to book — and reply with a short, plain-English summary.