Easy as Pie

Shopping for baked goods made easy... as pie!

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Inspiration

Who doesn't like baked goods? It's a great way to treat yourself or bring people together.

However, throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, getting ahold of your favorite sweet treats isn't easy. Going out to pick up your items can expose you to more people, thereby increasing your risk of COVID-19 infection.

We were inspired to create a project to help streamline the process of ordering and receiving baked goods. Moreover, our project could help support small businesses in the world of baking, along with their consumers!

What it does

Easy As Pie makes it more efficient for consumers to order baked goods from their phone. Using Whatsapp SMS via the Twilio API, users can simply input which item and the quantity of the item that they would like to purchase. Then, after cross-referencing a database, supported by Google Cloud, users can check if the item is in stock.

If the item is available, users can confirm their order by sending their address. Based on the address of the business and the address of the user, users can also get an estimated delivery arrival time.

Along with our Twilio project, we also decided to create a website for Easy as Pie. This includes an extra "wishlist" feature for users to keep track of what items they are interested in purchasing.

How we built it

The bulk of our project was powered by the Twilio API in order to allow for the Whatsapp messaging system. We also created a comprehensive database using Google Sheets, so we relied on Google Cloud to reference this data in our project. This included information on addresses of businesses, number of items available, etc. We also used Flask.

For the website, we used HTML/CSS/JS.

Finally, we relied on Github to create our code repositories.

Challenges we ran into

We were both pretty new to using the Twilio API, so it was fun to explore their different products. Initially, it was challenging to learn how to launch our Twilio extensions onto Whatsapp itself, but we were eventually able to get it working!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of finishing this project in a very short amount of time, especially since we learned so many new things! We're also really happy with how we were able to combine Twilio with Google Cloud.

What we learned

We learned how to use Twilio API for Whatsapp SMS!

What's next for Easy as Pie

In the future, we would like to add more complex details on the SMS platform. For example, we're interested in adding a feature for regular text updates as a delivery makes its way to the user!

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