EcoShopper

💡Inspiration 💡

We were inspired to do this project as since the pandemic a lot of people resorted to online shopping and because of sales tactics a lot of people make decisions on an impulse, especially when big corporations like Amazon offer next day delivery and nowadays even the same day delivery. This makes a lot of people buy products that they don't need and results in a big waste of money and a bigger waste for the environment.

❓What it does ❓

We made a chrome extension that allows the user to view the environmental impact of a product sold on Amazon which in theory would make the user think twice before buying a product. For example, if I am looking to buy a useless box (yes that's a real thing) I would think twice about before buying it if the environmental impact is negative. Another use case for this would be when I am looking to buy a new laptop per say, a new factor is introduced when buying a machine, environment sustainability. A laptop that cannot be recycled is less environmentally friendly compared to one that can be therefore I would be more lenient to the more environmentally friendly product for the sole purpose of helping the environment every way I can.

🛠️ How we built it 🛠️

We built this application by using basic Javascript, HTML, and CSS for the chrome extension. Although a chrome extension may not look very flashy compared to other applications (well, because it's an extension) but the code for it was complicated for us as we couldn't find a lot of helpful resources for a chrome extension and that alone took us around 12 hours of the hacking period. For determining whether a product is environmentally sustainable or not we wrote our own CUSTOM prompts. Now you may think we wrote 2 maybe 3 sentences instructing Co:here on what to do but no, we made prompts 2 pages long each that include prompt syntax rules, "performance enhancers" for the model (we had too much fun doing this), detailed instructions on what an environmentally sustainable product is, an example of a product and whether it's sustainable or not, description of product being evaluated, and a response in a specified format.

😡Challenges we ran into 😡

We had a hard time with prompts at first as this was a whole new concept for us. Making the prompts took 8+ hours of our hacking time as writing prompts is a new concept for all of us. The development of the chrome extension also had hiccups, we couldn't get the chrome extension working on all devices but only a few.

🥇Accomplishments that we're proud of 🥇

We made 3+ different prompts that work as intended

✍️What we learned ✍️

We learned how to make a chrome extension We learned that although AI is smart it can be manipulated very easily

🛍️What's next for EcoShopper 🛍️

Hopefully we can polish up our current extension and launch it to the world, by doing so we hope to address one of the main issues which is the problem of environmental waste