Product details

Pace Delivers at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY, is an on-campus student-run food delivery service launched as a pilot in April 2017. On a residential campus where many students did not own vehicles, Pace Delivers provided late-night food deliveries to students desiring off-campus restaurant food. As of November 2017, Pace Delivers had incurred heavy losses, in part due to its inability to accept Flex Dollars, a part of meal plan money students can use outside the campus dining services. The vendor the team hired to build an order-taking site for accepting Flex Dollars had not yet completed the site with the promised features. Therefore, the team had been able to accept only credit card payments through a Shopify e-Commerce site. Believing that the business was losing sales with its inability to accept Flex Dollars, the student managers had to decide whether to wait for the vendor to come through or adopt some other online payment alternative. The team also needed to come up with other ideas to help the business survive and become profitable in the long term. Featuring an on-campus student-run business catering to students, the case offers a business setting that students can readily understand and will find engaging. In addition, it provides insights into the challenges of launching an online business.