commune

Inspiration

We often hear people talk about how we should support small businesses, or local boutiques and operations in our community. Small businesses represent 99% of all employers in the US and are responsible for generating well over half of the new jobs created. This statistic highlights the importance of sustaining, maintaining, and growing our current population of small businesses around the country. Without them, many people will be out of income and employment, which jeopardizes the future of our economy and our country as a whole. Many of the most vulnerable populations in the US rely on small business employment and access to stay afloat during these times, and to have access to local resources that are crucial for daily life.

So given the importance of small businesses, we went on to isolate a couple of major hurdles that are uniquely exacerbated in the small business model. First is access to startup capital: this can be difficult for many local businesses or mom and pop shops that simply exist within the community and might not have an interest of truly expanding outwards, but still need cash flow to open up. Finding customers can also be difficult. Local and small businesses in general have a difficult time finding customers beyond a very small local pool. They may not have the funds to divert to an online presence, and they may be drowning in overhead because they have to spend money on rent to keep a physical space. It is definitely a daunting task to expand on the cloud when most customers seem to be in-person. Lastly, small businesses face increasing competition from large corporations who are able to drive down costs while maintaining wide spread access to meet customer demand, allowing them to grow a large, loyal customer base. More importantly, during the Covid-19 crisis, many small businesses are shuttering doors and facing financial challenges while losing customers. Therefore, it is more important than ever to help these businesses stay afloat by expanding their customer base to a global scale via the Internet.

What it does

The solution we propose, following the idea of online expansion, is commune. Commune is an intentional redistributing browser extension, with the purpose of sharing products of small businesses to a larger online community through the network presence of a larger online retailer.

The extension itself quickly and efficiently provides a list of small business alternative products when given a product that would be originally sourced from a large retailer. It utilizes the website and platform of large corporations to allow small businesses to directly advertise to individuals who would be interested in a similar product, often of better quality and value.

How we built it

Our chrome extension scrapes the retailer’s website for the product name, which we pass through the IBM natural language understanding API to get keywords to search over the small business retail website. We utilized brev to setup and scale our API. As results come back from the API, our chrome extension parses the data and generates cards to display to the user.

Challenges we ran into

During our planning phase we were struggling with our own brand image. We knew our idea had merit, however we didn't know how to portray ourselves and our idea to others. We combined the u and n in commune into a chain to form a connection. We try to connect you and small businesses.

Developmentally we encountered issues with processing amazon product names. Our backend now takes in multiple data points from the amazon product page to provide the user with only the most relevant small business items.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to set up a usable and functioning interface to demo our idea within the short time frame given. We also believe that this product is truly beneficial to small businesses, and hope to explore it in deeper detail in the future.

What we learned

Chrome extensions, IBM API's, and Brev were all new tools we had never used. In addition we all took turns teaching each other what we knew best, frontend, backend, design. We were really excited to be able to experiment and learn!

What's next for commune

With future extensions of our product, we hope to include add ons that will improve customer experience and business side fitness, making our extension a more useful and fluid experience for both the customer and the small businesses that rely on it for exposure.

Here are a couple of ideas that we have pinpointed as goals for future development. Firstly, we hope to expand the small business data set that we’re currently using to include physical locations of businesses, so that we can cover businesses that people can visit in person. This allows people to gather in their communities post Covid, and builds relations and brings customers to the actual location. This makes it so that customers are more likely to purchase more than one item. We'd also like to add price comparison and customer rating utilities, which would help the extension attract more users, and gives more potential for small business exposure. Users will feel more secure about purchasing through small businesses because they can be sure about their decisions by checking other consumer reviews, and by cross comparing price. We also want to allow users to track pricing and availability through wishlists.

Lastly, we hope to provide small businesses that are included in this extension the option of retrieving business analytics. This includes information such as how many users saved their products, how many bought their products from the extension, how much user traffic was rerouted to their website. We'd also like to allow businesses that are not on the list to add themselves via google form or some other secure path.