E-commerce Sustainability Calculator

Extension shell
Sustainability rating for the company JBL
Sustainability rating for the company Shell
Star rating system

Inspiration

We wanted to find ways to make e-commerce more convenient, as well as helping e-commerce merchants gain customers. After a bit of research, we discovered that one of the most important factors that consumers value is sustainability. According to FlowBox, 65% of consumers said that they would purchase products from companies who promote sustainability. In addition, the fastest growing e-commerce platforms endorse sustainability. Therefore, we wanted to create a method that allows consumers access to information regarding the company's sustainability policies.

What it does

Our project is a browser extension that allows users to browse e-commerce websites while being able to check the product manufactures'' sustainability via ratings out of 5 stars.

How we built it

We started building the HTML as the skeleton of the browser extension. We then proceeded with JavaScript to connect the extension with ChatGPT. Then, we asked ChatGPT a question regarding the general consensus of a company's sustainability. We run this review through sentimental analysis, which returns a ratio of positive and negative sentiment with relevance towards sustainability. This information is then converted into a value out of 5 stars, which is displayed on the extension homepage. We finalized the project with CSS, making the extension look cleaner and more user friendly.

Challenges we ran into

We had issues with running servers, as we struggled with the input and output of information. We also ran into trouble with setting up the Natural Language Processing models from TensorFlow. There were multiple models trained using different datasets and methods, despite the fact they all use TensorFlow, they were developed at different times, which means different versions of TensorFlow were used. It made the debugging process a lot more extensive and made the implementation take a lot more time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to create a browser extension that makes the lives of e-commerce developers and shoppers more convenient. We are also proud of making a visually appealing extension that is accessible to users. Furthermore, we are proud of implementing modern technology such as ChatGPT within our approach to solving the challenge.

What we learned

We learned how to create a browser extension from scratch and implement the OpenAi API to connect our requests to ChatGPT. We also learned how to use Natural Language Processing to detect how positive or negative the response we received from ChatGPT was. Finally, we learned how to convert the polarity we received into a rating that is easy to read and accessible to users.

What's next for E-commerce Sustainability Calculator

In the future, we would like to implement a feature that gives a rating to the reliability of our sustainability rating. Since there are many smaller and lesser known companies on e-commerce websites, they would not have that much information about their sustainability policies, so their sustainability rating would be a lot less accurate compared to a more relevant company. We would implement this by using the amount of google searches for a specific company as a metric to measure their relevance and then base a score using a scale that ranges the the number of google searches.