ToyYoda-star-financial

Github repo: https://github.com/ezazovsky/Toyota-Financial

Demo Login: username: admin@gmail.com password: 123456

Inspiration

We really liked Toyota's problem statement addressing user problems when it comes to getting quoted for financing and leasing. Part of our team was looking into purchasing a car, so building this project was insightful to see the UX workflow and all the information needed when it comes to financing/leasing.

Website Functionality

Our website supports the same features as the Toyota/TFS sites that personalized leasing and payment options based on a users annual income, credit score, and other financial information along with a user quiz suggest if they should lease or finance.

However, our website differentiates from TFS/Toyota by allowing dealerships to create custom leasing/financing packages (per cars, models, and trims). Ex: A car that sits on the lot for 200+ days may have a specific package to help sell the car. Customers will automatically be place into the most similar “buckets" based on user financial information. The user has the ability to send offers to the dealership, and the dealership is able to send and edit counter-offers. If the user does not like the given offer, then they can request a counter offer which the dealer can accept, approve, or give another counter offer.

The whole purpose is to give customers an estimate (that could be negotiated) even before stepping foot into a dealership as well as to give dealers a web interface to customize leasing/financing packages for customers and cars.

Tech Stack

To build and host the front-end we used a combination of Next.js and Vercel. For the back-end we used flask and firebase for the database.

Challenges I ran into

To host our app we used Vercel and we were working with it for the first time. We ran into issues several times deploying to Vercel at first due to formatting and linting practices that Vercel used that we weren’t familiar with. We had to do some of our own research and learn Vercel’s requirements to resolve these problems. There were also complications when we were trying to figure out the logic to place users into buckets created by the dealers.

Next Steps for Development

We could enhance cybersecurity by implementing cloudflare for DDOS attacks and global CDN caching to safeguard user data. We should also implement database indexing, caching (Cloud CDN/Redis), and load balancing to maintain performance as traffic and dealership interactions increase. Our server less architecture is monolithic so breaking it into microservices would allow for more scalability per component. Then we should make an integration tests by using Cypress to streamline the development process. To further improve our product, we can conduct users interviews on dealerships and users of the site to see what they like or dislike about it, and where we can improve.