Team #31: CashCart

Grocery shopping lists are a mundane part of our lives. What if we could use these lists to prepare for the future? CashCart aims to do just that with investment recommendations.

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Inspiration

As a student, We are often spending a significant amount of our income on groceries. Doing additional research, we found that a majority of grocery shoppers are women, an audience that research shows are losing out on huge retirement investments. By catering to women, we are able to have a larger impact on spreading awareness of investing early. People need to buy groceries their whole life, and with our product, they can buy groceries for themselves now and for the future.

What it does

Our product allows the user to see the effects of compound interest with everyday items. Given an item and its price today, it shows them how much they would need to invest today in order to be able to purchase that same item when they retire.

How we built it

– We used ReactJS for the Front End, python, Pandas, and BeautifulSoup in order to create the Web App and scrape the data from data sets

Challenges we ran into

– Experienced trouble using beautiful soup to extract only product names and their respective prices. Could not access desired text using only html and had to utilize pandas, a python data analysis library. – Had significant issues finding open-source data to support our project since most food datasets were proprietary or not publically available. – Downloading dependencies for React was cumbersome – We used GitHub to collaborate, a platform we have never used for collaboration before so there was a huge learning curve that came with it, this included losing some code while merging branches.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

– Successfully created a web scraper using python, beautiful soup, and the python package, pandas. – Developed a react JS web app to demonstrate our service – Presented an idea we believe is worth investing in – 3/4 of us Competed in our very first hackathon

What we learned

– We learned about how collaborative programming works using GitHub –Learned about python syntax and semantics –Learned about various python libraries such as Pandas and Beautiful Soup –Learned how to use ReactJS and HTML

What's next for CashCart

– Mobile app to increase accessibility – Connect with retirement funds to make investments available directly from the app – Get brand sponsorships to directly display on the website

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