-
Our Logo!
Inspiration
1) Lisa's parents constantly asks for where to buy certain items like wheelchairs, vacuum parts, and other miscellaneous items. However, if you ever attempt to search these on the web, the best you can find is anything on E-Commerce, which sometimes is really expensive. Although her parents would know of some small stores, it's by word-of-mouth or happen to see the store while passing by. Currently, there is no way to know what these local stores sell, their prices, or if they have sales. 2) There are also currently more and more stores closing down due to E-Commerce as they are unable to compete with Amazon and other large corporations. It is getting harder and harder for stores to stay open and for new stores to start a business. Although E-Commerce is an option, it is hard to compete with companies like Amazon where they are unable to compete with free and fast shipping. Also, for some business owners, E-Commerce is intimidating when they are not tech-savvy.
What it does
Our product redirects the concentration of how these local stores can compete with Amazon by focusing on their strong point - they are local to the consumers they cater to. With a simple login, a vendor can easily input and update their products for their store to match their current prices. On top of that, when a customer searches on the app, it takes into account the GPS location of the customer in relation to the stores to compute the prices they would end up paying in total. The customer inputs their car's estimate mpg, the product they are searching for, and how far they are willing to drive, and our program returns all the products matching the search within that radius with their information, price, and cost of gas to get there. In addition, since it is by location, it should minimize competition that depend on prices only, and those in places with fewer stores offering the same items can still compete without needing to go into price-lowering wars. For example, a store could have cheaper items, but being farther away from the customer could make them cost more than one that is closer.
How we built it
We brainstormed how we wanted to tackle this idea prior to starting. We only have one person who has some experience in both front-end and back-end who helped direct the app. Since he has familiarity with MongoDB and Angular, we ended up going with that route. We also chose Java Spring since most of us know how to code in that language. We also used AWS ec2 and s3 since there are credits we can use and the one experienced person we have is a little familiar with them.
Challenges we ran into
Most of us is really new and none of us know how to code in Java Spring, and there didn't seem to be a lot of information online. In addition, though we did have one person who had some experience, he is new to what we need to implement so there was a lot of confusion/questions overall. In addition, we cannot rely on one person to code the whole program. There were also many aspects of this app that we are not familiar with, like implementing a map API. There were also many thing we had to change in order to meet the time restriction, like changing it to only being a web app since we don't have anyone with mobile experience. In addition, we also had to drop out the Machine Learning part of the idea for a later implementation (this was to make it even easier for users to input/update their products). Finally, we had no designers or highly experienced front-end developers, so creating the app was quite challenging.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
With all but one of us being new to hackathons (maybe 2 if you count attending one without having code at one), we managed to get a lot of it done. We have learned a lot in a very short amount of time, and the program actually works! We also managed to get a working map, which we did not expect to have at the end.
What we learned
We learned a whole lot of languages that most of us don't have any experience coding in. We also learned about frameworks and GUIs as well. We also learned about each other such as characteristics and how to work with each other.
What's next for Local Market Love
Definitely once the app has the kinks ironed out like a logo, domain, a mobile app, we would like to pitch it to our local community. We all live in small Asian communities where store owners are not tech-savvy and prefer not to use technology if they don't have to. We would love to help out our communities to make it easier for them to stay in business and be able to advertise out their items. In addition, there are many ways we would like to expand and improve this app, such as adding the machine learning algorithm for updating/adding products, making it easier to advertise freshness of perishable items (ex: fish), and also spreading out to services like healthcare.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.