EcoSwap

Domain.com domain: http://ecoswap.tech/ (DNS hasn't updated yet)

Inspiration

The true cost of fast fashion and online shopping is serious environmental harm. Second hand shopping and thrifting is a great way to cut down on one’s carbon footprint. But the process can be time consuming and frustrating. We wanted to make the user experience of thrift shopping seamless and as enjoyable as online ecommerce. Items identical to those on large ecommerce platforms could also be available second-hand, or sustainably crafted on Etsy. That's what Ecoswap is here for! Any item you look up to buy, we'll auto suggest alternatives on Etsy.

What it does

EcoSwap is an online thrifting experience that helps save users money and the environment. Our chrome extension integrates seamlessly with the online shopping experience. Anytime you find a cool item, click on the EcoSwap extension icon and it will automatically determine what you're searching for. From there that data is used to locate and determine similar posts made by self-employed craftsman and artists that make the same item. You can also opt in to also consider used alternatives, which is where the Eco part of our name comes from because buying used clothes or any good saves on manufacturing resources and wasted water.

These recommendations will be fed to you on our website, which you can redirect to.

How we built it

The physical extension was written entirely with JavaScript. When the user clicks the extension button it will scrape image data obtained by using getElementByTag() and access the src attribute which is then passed to our node server in a POST request. We wrote our backend using node.js, axios, and Google's Vision Libraries. Essentially when our API voices a new event, our imageRecog.js will take that image source URL and pass it as an argument to Google Vision's label detection which then stores qualitative labels into a tags array. We then extract the useful elements in the tags array, such clothing_articles or color, and invoke Etsy's API to obtain listings with these tags passed as a parameter. Our frontend was built using Bootstrap and Node/Express.js. We were able to effectively link our chrome extension to directly link to our front-end UI.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of CORS errors, took a toll on us when trying to use our server logic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got it to actually work, and did not have to resort to hard coding.

What we learned

How to write a restAPI for a node service.

What's next for EcoSwap

We're still waiting on approval for Ebay's developer community so we can use their API and more than just ETSY, also OfferUP and LetGo will soon be releasing their APIs for development, so more platforms for us to suggest alternatives from. We also want users to be able to sell their items directly on our platform, encouraging them to contribute to the circular economy! Also we want to inject recommendations of alternatives rather than redirect the user to our website.

Built With

• axios
• bootstrap
• express.js
• google-vision-library
• node.js