DodoPO

Inspiration

As the pandemic hits, there was a lot of people trying to tap into the market of selling things online. There are many platform to do it already. Though, a lot of people done it through messaging services, like whatsapp, Line, etc. as what they're making they do it by-the-order system.

So, there was we, doing our first hackathon ever, not knowing what to do. Then, there was the light, a message calling for orders for a food item. We search for platform which supports pre-order system, and there was quite a lot. Though, none of them are in the business to do just that. So we thought, can we improve the experience towards selling things online and by-the-order?

Especially with a lot of "dark" pre-order using those messaging services. Some of them doesn't do many updates on the progress of our order, also with the handling of the money, some take cash up front, some 50% front payment, but the problem is that our money is already at their hands, isn't that a bit sketchy? So that seems it has a bit of problem we can try to solve using technology!

What it does

The website is basically a listing website for pre-ordered goods, and maybe even services. The user can sign-up easily (thanks cotter!) using e-mail, then go on make a listing on the website.

Each listing shows the photo of the item itself, how much is it (could be an estimate), the deadline of the order, and the quota the seller willing to fulfill. Each user can also buy an pre-order item as long as the deadline isn't met yet, and there is still quota of the order.

Regarding solving the problem with pre-ordering we also make that to consideration! As of course it is what we focused on at the first place. So, after ordering the buyer can see the updates made by the seller regarding their orders, also there's a contact to the seller—to make sure constant communication between seller and buyer. The money used to buy the pre-ordered goods are also being escrowed by us! So, no money is wired to the seller until your order is fulfilled!

How I built it

We use Next JS on this project as it seems it is quite a versatile platform to work on doing website. Also, because it is based on React which we already used before, so most of us are quite already in the know-how stage of it. So, the web itself is just an JS file of each of the pages. Some of the reusable components are made as a self-component so that the component can be reused somewhere else.

For the backend we used Azure Serverless Function. As it is absolutely easy to do, writing a function to do one thing and one thing only does really helps atomize and search for errors. The functions are quite easy it is basically just another way to get and put some data like users and listing into database. We also used noSQL database from Azure, that is CosmosDB. And finally there's a function to sync the listing into the user, as the user needs to have the id of the listing they made.

Challenges I ran into

Time. Most of it are time. Mostly because we are a newbie in doing hackathon, we needs more way to control our projects and all. Also, gauge if the project is too hard to do in the time frame or not. There are a lot of improvement we needed to do.

In fact, the target of finishing it to MVP doesn't even reached yet, it's still just a page, without it working too well. We need to make it next time.

Technical Problems Technical stuff are also quite the thing, we do use a lot of new technology like using serverless, next js, and vercel deployment. So there are a lot of time wasted on doing research and searching around. Next time we should stick to our most used tools instead.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Using serverless system in Azure A lot of it comes around with learning the "next-gen" system of hosting backend. A lot has been learned and a lot of time has been used.
Making a web using react As we mentioned before, we are all have been using react before, though the one we use are react native which is used for mobile apps and web, but we didn't use the web function of course.

What I learned

Time management, we really need to space our time better, maybe sleep a little less as well.
Gauging the project, for our next hackathon we'll absolutely try to limit our MVP to even lower than this time, having a target too big is quite the burden for us, technically, physically, and also mentally.

What's next for DodoPO

For now, it's a bye-bye, but maybe in the future we will be re-visiting the old project, (and maybe business idea) to maybe finished her up and get her running! This and also making it more clean, secure, and finished of course.