Inspiration
What it does
Lockdowns and market closures got you down? Food delivery fees too expensive for you? Well, look no further! Our hack aims to bring daily necessities and other items to people by encouraging people to buy these items together. Our website serves as a conduit that connects people living in the same area and looking for the same items to get it together so that delivery costs can be reduced, if not negligible.
The Carousell for groupbuy, if you will.
To begin, users can simply navigate to the category of items that they are looking for that is in their area and join the telegram group to buy the items with others by browsing the listings. Alternatively, users can initiate and act as the group leader by submitting and listing with a link to the telegram group for others to join, and discuss details on how they are going to purchase the items. This can be accessed via the "Submit listing" tab. This allows users to meet others in their area who share similar interests with them (e.g. love for baking), forming new friendships and relationships in the process.
We understand that not all gurus have a platform for them to share their wisdom easily. Our website offers these gurus an opportunity to share the best items and lobangs with others so that others can learn as well, which can be accessed via the "Learn" tab. This way, knowledge can be passed down for others to benefit.
Groop-py-py-py-py... Group Buy everything at Groopy!
How we built it
React, React Bootstrap, Firebase
Challenges we ran into
The team had a mix of individuals from different majors, and not everyone was familiar with the use of React and Firebase. However, we wanted to take this opportunity to push ourselves to learn something new, such as using React and deploying Firebase.
We wanted users to navigate to the different pages seamlessly through the navigation bar, but had troubles doing so. With lots of trial and error, we got it to work in the end, along with the other buttons in the website so that users are able to interact with them instead of just incorporating duds.
We encountered the most difficulty in deploying Firebase - we could not get it to host the site until the eleventh hour. Fortunately, with lots of determination and trial and error, we got it to work in the end.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Building a website from scratch, ensuring that users are able to interact seamlessly with the different pages by clicking on the respective buttons and icons on the navigation bar.
Most importantly, we learnt to work better under time pressure, delivering a site that fulfills the objectives of what we set out to do - bringing people together to save on the costs of delivery while also allowing the exchange of knowledge on our platform, such as how to best choose an apple.
What we learned
Code collaboration through means such as VisualStudio, using React and React Bootstrap. We also learnt the different ways to make the whole website nicer, through the amalgamation of different programming languages such as HTML and CSS.
We were glad that some of our team members had the foresight to suggest that we use the commit function every now and then to ensure that old snippets of the codes could be retrieved every now and then just in case something averse happens to the code. This is an important skill that can be transferred to many other areas of our lives too - it is always important to have backup copies of your work.
We also learnt to deploy the site on Firebase, as well as store and retrieve data on Cloud Firestore. This was something new to most of us, and we are proud that we were able to grasp the basics of it and implement it in our project.
What's next for Groopy
- Fix alignment and styling issues
- Adding specific addresses, filtering by user's location
- Forums and live chat for users to interact in app
- Deploy filters in the listings submitted by users to ensure that no inappropriate and dangerous items are listed (e.g. bombs and explosives).
Built With
- bootstrap
- css
- firebase
- html
- javascript
- react
- react-bootstrap
- visual-studio
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