Buy Sustainable

buysus.online landing page
search page
extension

Inspiration

We wanted to gamify sustainability by giving users points for sustainable activity to encourage them to be more sustainable. We found that Amazon has a "Climate Pledge Friendly Certification" that helps distinguish more sustainable products on their site link. By filtering this certification on Amazon, we can track and recommend sustainable products that they are viewing and buying and give them points to encourage them to be more sustainable.

What it does

We decided to build a website app and chrome extension similar to Honey where it gives you points and monitors what you are looking at and buying, but instead of giving you points when you buy products from certain stores, our extension gives money when you buy and view products with this climate certification. It also tells you if an item you're viewing has this tag and recommends you other sustainable option based on the product. The website app tells you more about the certification, tracks you're points, points history, and allows you to search for sustainable products on amazon.

How we built it

We began by registering a domain with Domain.com -- our website is hosted on buysus.online! The website itself is hosted on google cloud using their App Engine service. We got amazon products with a web scraping suite that returned .JSON files that we could display on the site.

Challenges we ran into

It's very difficult to get item descriptions, prices, and images from amazon products. The web scraping took the longest. The domain also had some issues updating the CNAME, A, and TXT records, which we needed to host the site under the domain buysus.online