Ecolyze

Inspiration

Fashion is one of the most polluting industries on the planet — but when you're scrolling Amazon at midnight, none of that shows up on the product page. You see a price, a rating, and a photo. That's it.

We kept thinking about how much easier it would be to make sustainable choices if the information just... appeared. No new tabs, no research rabbit holes, no trying to decode cryptic certifications. What if sustainability was as visible as the star rating?

That question became Ecolyze.

What it does

Ecolyze is a Chrome extension that sits inside your Amazon shopping experience and silently does the hard work for you. Click analyze on any clothing page and get an instant AI-powered sustainability score, a breakdown of what's driving it, and a specific greener alternative you can buy right now — all without leaving the page.

How we built it

We built Ecolyze as a Chrome extension using the Gemini API for AI-powered sustainability scoring and SerpAPI to fetch real product alternatives live from Amazon. The extension scrapes product data directly from the page, sends it to Gemini with a carefully crafted sustainability coaching prompt, and surfaces the results in a clean popup UI. A waitlist landing page at shopecolyze.netlify.app handles early interest, backed by Supabase.

Challenges we ran into

Amazon's DOM was our biggest enemy — multiple page layouts, lazy-loaded content, invisible characters, and SPA navigation that doesn't trigger page reloads. Getting consistent data out of it required a lot of creative scraping strategies. Coaxing Gemini into returning perfectly structured JSON every single time was its own battle too.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The full loop actually works. You land on an Amazon clothing page, click analyze, and within seconds you have a real AI-generated sustainability score and a live alternative product you can buy. Shipping that complete experience — from DOM scrape to AI reasoning to live product fetch to rendered UI — inside a hackathon felt genuinely exciting.

What we learned

Building a Google Chrome extension for the first time was a real challenge. Learning DOM Scraping to leverage all the information on the webpage was exciting. We also got a chance to learn how to use SerpAPI. Our first hackathon so a great experience.

What's next for Ecolyze

Authentication and personal dashboards so users can track their sustainability journey over time. Support for more retailers beyond Amazon. Community-sourced brand ratings to fight greenwashing at scale. And eventually, a carbon offset integration so every swap isn't just a better purchase — it's a net positive one.

Built With

• css
• gemini
• html
• javascript
• manifestv3
• serpapi