easyTrade

We want to help grow small businesses and improve their business and make a platform for customers to get delivered or required products easily and fastly.

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Inspiration

Growth of Amazon and Walmart, and the need for easy online ordering for small stores.

What it does

Our app allows users to search for an item and shows matching items available at small retailers, sorted by price. These app mainly helps small business store earn their money and also make the availability of items more clear to customers to both save time and shop more efficiently.

How we built it

We used vue-native and expo to make the smartphone app that allowed a user to send a search query for a particular item. Our nodejs backend server took in the search query and downloaded all the inventory items from merchants using the NCR Silver Point of Sale API. A fuzzy search was run and the matching items returned to the app, which displayed them and sorted them by price.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was to choose framework with which to develop because we didn't have much experience with mobile apps. We had tried to implement the API, but we weren't getting our expected data.So, we hacked away and managed to make our own fix!.

Accomplishments that We are proud of

We were successfully able to accomplish customer searching for items in store inventories. We learned how to work with backend software like nodejs as well as frontend frameworks for rapid development.

What we learned

We learned how to develop with vue-native and expo to make simple smartphone apps, and also how to deal with API calls involving lots of data. Also, we learned to work around unexpected factors (such as an API promising to return a value... yet not returning it...) that are out of our control, learned about API's and how to pull and parse HTTP requests. We learned more about JSON objects and arrays.

What's next for easyTrade

We plan on improving the overall design. EasyTrade has a lot of potential for future growth. We would love to create a special delivery for the user to deliver within an hour. Making small businesses online will have a strong impact on current retail store industry. We believe that it has the capacity to bring a change the way how current e-commerce websites work by integrating existing Point of Sale and inventory management technologies with online shopping.

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