Hack Covid

Inspiration

Imagine a man, who has wife, elderly parent, and two children, cannot protect his family from pandemic. He spend hours in the Web to find a place to buy or order sanitizers, but everything what he sees is out of stock messages, very high prices. A serious need to help his family forces a man to order a big amount of PPEs from random eCommerce shop, which turned out as a scam. So, as a result, a man wasted several hundred dollars.

Imagine the business, which makes a profit due to physical work of its employees, cannot provide PPE (personal protective equipment) to workers. The working equipment is not sanitized, and people do not even have masks to protect not only customers (in case of taxi services or food deliver), but also themselves from the customers. And the local B2B markets do not produce enough amount of PPE to buy as soon as possible.

I do not ask you imagine the situation with hospitals, because, you already know and read about it every day.

I was really mad when I saw news about resellers, scam products, how people sell already used masks. And people are in panic, they have no idea how other bad people take an advantage of them, selling crap. I could not stand aside and developed Global Inventory Check.

Problem

Big absence of PPE (personal protective equipment) makes almost impossible to find a place to buy some for consumers, businesses, and even hospitals
- I do not provide details here, because it is well-known fact, and providing details can show that our team is not aware of global problems. Every day it is possible to find more and more articles about this problem. And we are pretty sure, you face the same problem
Because of the panic and intensive PPE purchasing, scammers become more active.
- Great news articles from Australian government, dated by the 18th of March, 2020 Link to the articles
- Only since 13 of February, there are almost 30,000 scam reports in eCommerce industry, according to BBB. (Important: their statistics only based on the reports, which they directly receive from people
- February 2020 Financial loss due to scams in _ Buy & Selling _ category i more than 1,600,000 dollars, according to reports to Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. Also, Australian market experienced 26% increase since January 2020.
- Google Trends: increase of searches by keyword masks by 900%, and increase of searches by keyword ppe by 300%
People takes advantages of others. Resellers sell products a way higher then the original price, which makes impossible for low-income part of the population to buy PPE
- This news describes how 2 browsers from Tennessee, USA bought 18,000 sanitizers. They also had wipes, masks, and other PPEs. The great example of what they did was the purchase of Pandemic Kit for 3.50 with a reselling on eBay with a price almost 60 dollars Link to the article

Solution (already in production with live data)

Inventory Status Check of eCommerce shops and Big Retailers to provide fast discovery of truthful distributors of PPEs and essential supplies for Businesses and Direct Consumers, who needs it.

Bullet points description:

Simply saying, this is an aggregator, which connects customers and sellers in a one place
Instead of spending hours and days for a research, come to our platform and spend 30 seconds to buy PPEs
Support eCommerce shops inventory status information, as well as a big retailers (for example, Apotek, Walmart, Walgreens
30 minutes automatic updates on inventory of each shop (regardless the countries of operations, amount of products), which is summarized on the main page for each retailer
Manual verification of each shop in the list to provide basic important information about the shop (for example, average prices, countries of operations, location). The most important reason of verification to be sure that shop can sell what it orders (no scam, no back order, no fake products).
B2B and Hospital solution will help to buy a big amount of PPEs in any B2B marketplace across the Globe
Not in production, but in the progress of development - scrapping the reviews about each shop from different websites (similar to Trustpilot).

Technical Description

Question: What technologies are used to build the solution? Answer: Vue.js, Node.js, MongoDB, Heroku, Netlify, Dashblock, Browserless, Pupetteer

Question: How do you get all the live data on the application, with automatical updates every 30 minutes? Answer: We use 3 way of extracting the data.

We have manual scrappers for difficult HTML semantics to extract the status of particular product (title, price, availability). And so, we use Browserless to run our scrappers on the 3rd party service, independently from our infrastructure
We use Dashblock to turn any webpage to API. So, for any website we spend less then 20 minutes to setup such an API for the future reuse
For big retailers (multinational retailer corporations) we extract availability and stock information for each product, for each shop, and for each country. We do it with a help of open APIs, which are provided by these retailers, or hidden somewhere in their code, but also publicly available without any licensing or restrictions to use.

Question: What is the stage of development cycle of your application? Answer: It is in production (real workable) responsive web app, with real data there (which is updated every 30 minutes).

Achieved Progress

Real product app, which works. (Right now for only B2C segment)
Conducted user interviews with more than 150 people.
16 Tracked shops (and data from there), as well as 60 under analysis right now
Started manual verification and interaction with each listed shop
Found 5 sponsors who provide us their services (listed on the main page of the app)
Booked a meeting with Head of Future in Helsinbord, Sweden next week to discuss possible adoption of this technology in Sweden for B2C and B2B markets

Business Modal (during COVID-19)

B2C Segment and Hospitals Absolutely free! My main initiative is to help as many people as I can during this pandemic

B2B Segment It will work like a subscription box. Business pays weekly, monthly, quartely, and he has access to all the data about eCommerce shops, Big Retailers, and B2B marketplaces as well. Explanation what is B2B marketplace from Quora

Ability to setup complicated notifications
24/7 Support
More detailed description of each B2B marketplace.
Totally, instead of several hours or days, the user will spend as a maximum 30 minutes to see the right B2B marketplace to buy PPE

Business Modal (after COVID-19)

After COVID-19, the popularity of such an app will be about 3-6 months, because all people and businesses will still experience the shortage of PPEs. So, it will be a great place to buy some.

The greatest thing about this application, that such an solution can be adopted for any sphere, any industry, any business. Information, especially categorized information, always costs money, and it costs a lot. After 6 months of working on this project, we will gain invaluable knowledge and experience, which allows us to build the similar application and turns into the very profitable business.

The next steps

Hire people to conduct observation of eCommerce shops and populate our database from our pocket
Continue looking for partnerships, especially in government sector
Looking for sponsorships
Get 10,000 Unique users till 13th of April, 2020
Product Hunt publishing