Wayfair Wizard

Chrome extension that shows related Wayfair products and relevant coupons when customers are on competitor sites!

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Inspiration

Our inspiration came from Honey, a browser extension that helps customers find coupons and apply coupons while shopping online. We wanted to build something that would bring customers back to Wayfair when they were shopping on other online sites, by reminding them of Wayfair's extensive product catalog and by providing additional, relevant deals.

What it does

Wayfair Wizard is a Google Chrome extension that entices customers to return to Wayfair. When a customer is browsing for a product on a competitor site, it injects a carousel of similar Wayfair products and searches for relevant Wayfair coupons targeted towards the product they are looking at. It does so by scraping the product display page of competitor sites for an image URL, which is sent to an endpoint that utilizes our internal Visual Search Service to find similar Wayfair products. Additionally, Wayfair Wizard searches for coupons of the product category (e.g. sofa, desk) that the customer is interested in. If such a coupon exists, the coupon code is also displayed in the product display page of the competitor's site.

As an added bonus, Wayfair Wizard can show the user information about their upcoming orders (either estimated time of delivery or "Order Delivered" if the order was already delivered).

Currently works on Amazon, Pottery Barn, and IKEA!

How we built it

  • We're leveraging Wayfair's Visual Search Service to identify similar products and a product's category
  • To find existing coupon codes that apply to a product category, we're using the PromoV2 system
  • create-react-app was bootstrapped to our Chrome extension for our UI
  • A node.js server (Express.js) was used as a proxy to hit our PHP dev machines and bypass CORS

Challenges we ran into

  • Because our application is a browser extension that lives outside of the Wayfair codebase, one of our biggest challenges was figuring out a way for the application to reach our PHP endpoint.
  • Furthermore, to get by CORS and the network security of our dev machines, we needed to ssh into a machine and run PHP via the CLI

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Spinning up a development workflow that five people could work with simultaneously and actively contribute without to much friction
  • Learning new libraries on the fly and being able to integrate them successfully
  • Working in areas outside of our comfort zones and persisting through challenges

What we learned

  • How to build Chrome extension from scratch and creating manifest.json with all the necessary permissions
  • Sending data from our extension through the Node.js server to our PHP dev machines to overcome the obstacles of CORS
  • Bypassing Amazon's sophisticated bot detection to obtain image URLs, scraping other competitor sites for image URLs
  • Leveraging internal Wayfair services that we were unfamiliar with (e.g. PromoV2, Visual Search Service)

What's next for Wayfair Wizard

  • Link to existing sales on Wayfair that are related to the product that the user is looking at
  • Generate coupons on the fly for targeted customers
  • Display a "Trending Products" section
  • Add a tracking progress bar for a user's active unshipped orders
  • Add a friend referral feature

The Team

Five friends who met during Wayfair Labs!

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