EcoBuy

EcoBuy Logo

Inspiration

We want to make a positive change in the way e-commerce is understood, make more sustainable online purchases and give conciousness to the users about the impact of delivering in the environment.

What it does

EcoBuy is a chrome plugin that can rate how eco-friendly a product is in a given marketplace, make recommendations of more sustainable options and give statistics about the environmental footprint of the user historical purchases.

How we built it

For building it, an scrapping algorithm takes the relevant information from a product such as the shipping distance, weight, volumen, origin, materials... and calculates an eco-friendly score that goes from 0 to 100. Close to the product price, a circle with this number will appear together with a color from red to green indicating how environmentally friendly is the product. If the user does the purchase, this will be sent to our data base, where it will be processed and stored in the chrome extension of the user. After that, the plugin will show statistics to the user about his historical and his ecofriendly behavior compared to the other users.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into problems when: -Connecting python with javascripts. -Standardizing the format for the scrapping. -Learning how to build a Chrome Extension.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to present a MVP with the essential functionalities of the plugin we had in mind.

What we learned

We learnt how to organize a multidisciplinary project with very unrelated professional profiles. In our team we have a physicist, two computer science and telecommunications engineers and an aerospace engineer and economist. Also, it has been really fulfilling to see the commitment of the team members without sleeping at all.

What's next for EcoBuy

We want to operate in the main E - Commerce platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon… Also, EcoBuy was built for creating a community where to promote an eco-friendly consciousness in this business that is tremendously growing year by year. We would like to have a possible collaborations with big E - Commerce companies in order to get more accurate information and improve the eco-friendly product index.

Related to our code, we would like to improve the more sustainable alternatives recommender together with the scrapping speed by using Google APIs and faster scrapping strategies.