Inspiration
Shopping for a car is a big decision, second to buying a home. FindingGetting a great car for a great price is hard. Too often dealerships hide fees, and take advantage of unknowing consumers. Something that should be fun, feels more like a fleecing. What if we could change the experience behind shopping for a car?
Partnering with Carmax, Our challenge was to find a way to help car buyers find the car of their dreams nationwide. Carmax has over 35,000 vehicles nationwide. That’s a lot of vehicles! Car buyers can order vehicles from any Carmax dealership in the country. From Maine to California, a shopper can ship a vehicle and test drive it at their convenience. Shoppers may have to pay a fee for shipping and transporting their potential vehicle. A surprise fee can ruin the total experience and ruin a customer relationship. How can we empower car shoppers to make the best choice available?
This project is submitted under the Carmax Challenge, Best Use of Google Cloud, for the RamHacks 2020 Hackathon.
What it does
Our tool helps car shoppers select a vehicle by their physical location and gives them the option of seeing the transfer fees associated with that vehicle, and gives them alternatives that may suit their needs better. Whether it’s shipping directly to the consumer or the lot down the road, we make the car buying experience better.
Giving a best pick recommendation, and alternative options, with the added capability to see the closest dealership that gives buyers a flexible way to shop.
How I built it
Inspired by the design of the current UX/UI of Carmax and seeing how others allow users to shop by location, we created high fidelity wireframes in Adobe XD, building a custom design library that replicates Carmax’s designs.
Scraping real data from Carmax dealerships. We used Python, Google Firebase, Google Maps API and Flask to calculate a Total Transfer fee based on real distances. We created geolocation data using real dealerships, and showing real vehicle details. We also created an authentication system.
We used React and Flask to manage the front end.
Challenges I ran into
- Hardcoding images using API Material UI was a lot harder than we expected
- Plugins with XD
- Time
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Great teamwork
What I learned
Some of our main goals at the start of this hackathon was to practice and understand the Flask package in python and develop our UI/UX skills. We also learned plenty of information about the process of full stack development, using Google APIs and effectively working together as a team in an online environment. Our team has never been in a team together and we found interesting ways to stay motivated and collaborate effectively.
What's next for Carmax Transfer Price Selector
- Continue to improve our user ability and filtering system to allow alternative sorting options.
- Integrate Google Maps JavasScript API into frontend to provide users visualization.
- Continue to improve user experience by presenting car selection based on total price with no hidden fees.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.