Bazaar

Bazaar is the one-stop shop to support small minority-, women-, and LGBTQ-owned businesses that promote environmentally-friendly products.

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Problem Statement

Lack of exposure and availability of products created by minority groups and ECG based companies.

Inspiration

Small businesses took a particularly large hit during the COVID pandemic Businesses owned by minorities, women, and LGBTQ members (MWGBs) face challenges towards achieving the same success as other businesses Many local businesses don’t have the resources to market themselves and suffer from lack of awareness

What it Does

Bazaar is a social media network for retail purchases showing off the cool things you buy to your friends Products that are environmentally-friendly and/or bought from MWGBs are prioritized higher on the feed so they can stand out more Users receive points for their purchases (buying environmentally-friendly or MWGB products gets a lot more points). Also, on your next order (at any store), you gain double points for posting your purchases to your friends! Once you get a certain number points, you can get rewards like gift cards at the local stores you love! A stores tab in the app lists MWGBs around you and links to their website.

How it Works

When you buy an item at a supporting business, you scan your QR code and the verified purchase appears in your purchase list You can post the item to the feed from the purchase list, sharing it to other Bazaar users You gain points for every purchase, varying based on what types of small local businesses you’re supporting, eventually leading to rewards You gain badges for collecting a certain amount of purchases of a given type You can search for local small minority owned businesses to find their summaries and websites to further support them You can form a network of friends to share your progress in supporting your favorite businesses with

Use Cases

Learn about new products. Have the opportunity to exercise loyalty based rewards. Interact with consumers who share similar interests as well as advertise for products they believe in.

How we Built It

Developed an iOS mobile application in XCode using Storyboards and Swift Linked Swift frontend to Firebase database to deal with storing data and media, as well as authentication profiles A mock POS Android App that acts the store that would verify users’ purchases by QR codes unique to each user and automatically add their orders to their profile A backend using Python that handles all of the requests to the NCR APIs using HMAC authentication, as well as the bulk of the interaction with our database. This also receives the sales info from stores when a user makes a purchase and adds those products to the user’s profiles.

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