Bulkies

Bulkies home screen

Inspiration

Buying in bulk is more economical than buying individual items, but for people who live alone, it's not always possible to buy in bulk without food and supplies going to waste. Our team decided to make it easier for consumers to share products and buy in bulk.

What it does

Our website, Bulkies, facilitates communication between people who want to buy in bulk and split the items among multiple people. Users can post items they would like to buy in bulk, along with quantities, prices, and images. All users can search within a customizable radius to find people near them who want to bulk buy products they're mutually interested in. Users can get in touch through product postings and initiate a bulk buy.

How we built it

We coded the website in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We used Google Authentication to authenticate users and create their accounts. We also used the Google Maps API to retrieve users' current locations and calculate the distance between different users' locations. We used Bootstrap to format and make buttons.

Challenges we ran into

For most of the hackathon, we were trying to build a completely different idea -- TeamDriven, a website that analyzes Google Drive revision and edit history to produce useful visualizations of how much each user contributed to a Google Doc. However, we ran into several challenges with pulling data from the Google Drive API, so we decided to finish this project after the hackathon and instead build a completely new project, Bulkies, in under 6 hours.

Accomplishments that we're proud of and what we learned

Despite the limited time and the many technical difficulties we faced, we were able to create a working website that accomplished the basic functionality we envisioned for Bulkies. We learned how to work in a time crunch by prioritizing what was most important for the website to accomplish its purpose, which will be useful in the future as we work on more complicated projects on tight schedules. In addition, while working on our original idea, we learned a lot about Google APIs, and we were able to combine several different APIs (Drive Activity, Drive, People, etc.) to come up with a creative way to accomplish our project's purpose. Even though we couldn't finish the project due to its complexity, we look forward to continue developing it in the future as a team.

What's next for Bulkies

We look forward to further developing Bulkies. We want to host our website on the domain bulkies.tech as soon as possible. We are also planning to add a chat feature so users can chat before deciding to form a bulk buying group. To improve the search, we would like to add search and sorting parameters like product name, price, and city. In the far future, we would be interested in getting more users on the site and facilitating real bulk buying interactions by connecting similar-minded consumers.