DealMaster

Inspiration

Our inspiration for DealMaster was an idea from one of our members that gained inspiration from sites like NewEgg and PCPartPicker. We thought that it would be a useful tool to people who often shop online, and we thought it would pose a nice challenge of what we were and were not comfortable with.

What it does

DealMaster is a webscraper that takes in a physical product from a user. It goes on to get prices from various websites (Amazon, BestBuy, etc.) and gives us an organized, display of prices from different sites. It aids the user in making their choices of what is the best bang for their buck, and ultimately price checks from multiple sites without an egregious amount of tabs. These sites can be organized into things like best deal, best specs, and most relevant.

How we built it

We built our site from scratch, utilizing normal HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make up our front-end, and DBmongo and Python for the back end.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were that not a lot of us knew much about front-end development. Some of our members stepped up and pretty much learned on the fly to create our homepage, and a big struggle was formatting divs and pictures, and making our navbar work. We had challenges with implementing web api, and filtering results using parsed html.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud how much usability our site has to it, and it was our first full-stack project. Our team learned what producing a website was really like, and we gained a broader knowledge of web APIs, Python libraries, and fullstack connection.

What's next for Dealmaster

DealMaster isn't finished by all means. Our team is a beginner-group from the OCC Computer Science Club, and we plan on working on DealMaster past HACKUCI, and making it into one of our personal projects. We have a strong vision of polishing up the CSS and usability of DealMaster, and improving efficiency and code. Adding more features including Machine Learning for better search, APIs, and better design.