ecoShopper

Shop the green way

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Inspiration : Why ecoShopper?

What inspired us to create this product? Apathy is the word! Data from Climate Change in the American Mind surveys show that around 73% of Americans think global warming is happening and almost 69% say that they are worried about climate change. Seems like a promising number right? But, according to Nielsen, in the U.S. sales of products with sustainable attributes make up to only 22% of the total store, with organic, sustainable and clean attributes driving the majority of the sustainable category’s growth. Thus we can observe, there is a vast gap between awareness and the percentage of people who are actually taking the extra steps to act on it. However, all’s not lost; here’s the silver lining. Nielsen also points out that around 75% of millennials are willing to change their purchase/consumption habits in order to reduce the impact of the environment. This is where ecoShopper comes in. We make use of the positive willingness of the millennials and the consumers in them and try to influence them, by giving the right impetus, towards greener steps. Our chrome extension and web application aims to play on the users' tendencies and make it more convenient for them to notice and buy Eco-friendly products.

Action: What ecoShopper does?

ecoShopper is a Chrome Extension that offers alternative Eco-friendly products as suggested products when a customer adds any product to his/her shopping cart. It includes a web dashboard, which keeps track of user data and presents various metrics of how their shopping activity affects the environment. Thus making the user aware of his/her contributions and keeping him/her motivated about helping the environment.

Creation:

The initial phase of the project involved the creation of a Chrome extension. For the chrome extension, we had to use javascript primarily for all the functionalities and JSON for the manifest. The main focus of the extension was to search for similar eco-friendly products as to ones enlisted in the cart of an eCommerce site. We achieve that by using an API along with our NLP - RAKE model which extracts keywords from the cart's products and feeds it to the API to get similar eco-friendly products. Beyond this, we have also created a web dashboard that would help the user keep track of his changes. In that, we measure various metrics like savings in terms of emission, materials ( plastic, etc. ) and also showcasing overall contribution of all users to motivate each user to do better.

Challenges:

There were various challenges we encountered, few of which were related to the extension development which none of us had done before. Few were related to the google cloud app engine since it is meant for a proper Production environment. Hence, we had to apply appropriate techniques to get it set for our application. It consumed a lot of time, but was worth developing since dealing with issues was easier once it was set up since it was a prod environment and debugging was cleaner.

Accomplishments:

  • Created a chrome extension from scratch with minimal external assistance
  • Bypassed various hurdles in terms of unavailability of Amazon API( only available for associates ) which was our basic framework when we were planning it.
  • Developed a flask web app in a Prod environment to be pushed into the Google Cloud App Engine

Takeaways: What we learned

  • Learnt how to build an extension
  • Learnt how to build web applications in a Production environment
  • In the process of learning about our target audience, we realized how many people actually want to make changes for the environment, but don't have enough information to act on it in their busy lives
  • Used NLP-RAKE model and analysis of various other models for short sized keyword extraction

Scope: What's next for ecoShopper

EcoShopper can have varied applications in the real-world. We intend to expand it to a mobile application that not only gives the user an alternative for shopping stuff, but at other daily activities too. For example, if a user intends to take a cab ride, ecoShopper should give the user alternative eco-friendly options like walking, taking a bike ride or taking the bus. We intend ecoShopper act as the required impetus in order to influence people to take greener steps.

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