Comércio Não Para (Commerce won't stop)

Support small business during the COVID-19 isolation. Here you can find stores near you or register your own stores to safely sell products by delivery

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Inspiration

In Brasília (Brazil) the government declared that all street stores should be closed as part of the COVID-19 isolation procedures. This happened in several other cities too. I heard the news on the 19th of march and by the next day, started thinking that something should be done in order to try to save small/medium businesses from bankruptcy.

By noon of the 20th of march, I decided to tell my co-workers at Lacuna Software that I wished to start a "Lighting-Project" to build a website in which small business owners could advertise their stores and products so they could be safely delivered to customers during the isolation. That way, they could still have some income even though their stores were closed. Everybody loved the idea and wanted to participate.

I asked Lacuna Software's partners and they allowed every volunteer to immediately stop what they were doing and start working on this project. Our goal was to build and publish the website by 11:59 PM of the same day.

Our initial goal could not be met in time, but we eventually were able to publish the first version by 6 PM of the following day (21st of march).

What it does

The main goal of this project is to connect business owners and customers in isolation. So, it provides a platform where customers can contact local stores to combine the purchase and delivery of products without leaving their homes.

If you are a business owner you may register your stores and provide contact information so consumers can contact you directly (by email, WhatsApp or phone number) to arrange the delivery of products they want in the area they live in.

If you are a customer you may filter stores by State, City, Category and a free text field that describes what you are looking for.

It is intended to be used by people in all Brazilian cities.

How we built it

After recruiting all the volunteers, I created a simple wireframe of the website (which is available here). This step was really important to define and keep everyone aware of the features we needed to implement for the MVP (Minimal Viable Product).

The next step was to create small teams, each one responsible for a different aspect of the project:

  1. Bootstrapping (creating repository, setting up the project) and integration with frameworks

  2. General Design (logos, images and colors)

  3. Persistence (database access) and REST APIs

  4. UI/UX

  5. Mobile (Android and iOS apps)

  6. Textual content

  7. DevOps and Infrastructure

In order to maximize productivity, volunteers were assigned to teams according to affinity and previous experience with similar tasks. Constant communication and cooperation were essential to complete the project in such a short time span.

Another key aspect was the use of well tested in-house frameworks and services:

  1. GrantID an OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect authorization server.

  2. Lacuna SPA: Angular Single Page Application (SPA) framework designed to provide basic functionality such as login, user permissions/roles, dialogs/prompts and basic layout.

Challenges we ran into

The time constraint and parallelization were our initial challenges in this endeavor. Even though we tried to create teams that could work separately, we still had some situations where a team would have to wait for another team to complete a task in order to keep working.

Communication between team members and also everybody involved was paramount. We tried different tools but the one that really worked for us was Discord (which has since been adopted as our favorite communication tool at Lacuna Software).

After the release of the website, came our biggest challenge: marketing. In order to actually achieve results, we need people to know what it is and what it can be used for.

We’ve tried contacting local and national Newspapers but have not heard anything back (probably because they are quite busy with all that is going on because of the virus). This challenge could not be overcome yet and is one of the reasons that motivated us to participate in this contest.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The creation of a good looking (at least in our eyes) and production-ready website that has the potential to help a lot of people and the economy of our country - in approximately 28 hours.

What we learned

This project was an important proof of concept: it is possible to design and build a quality product in a short period of time with people working remotely (if you have the right tools and very skilled people like we do).

What's next for Comércio Não Para (Commerce won't stop)

After our initial release, we started receiving feedback from store owners and costumers and we are trying to keep a steady pace of new versions with improvements and bug fixes.

We are currently working on finding an official channel/tool to receive bug reports and feedback from users and discovering ways to reach more people to increase the number of users and supporters.

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