Price Port

Inspiration

Our team consists of those with diverse cultural backgrounds, we thought of how prices for the same items differ throughout different countries.

What it does

This site helps international flyers to figure out the best prices for specific items along their itinerary . This site compares real shopping prices across different countries. Pulling live currency exchange rates and current product listings. The site factors in each country’s tourist tax refund policy to calculate the most efficient place to buy the item. Showing the user where the traveler gets the most purchasing power for the item they desire.

How we built it

We created this webapp by utilizing three different api sources. first, we pull real-time currency exchange rates from the Frankfurter API and current product listings from Google Shopping via SerpApi for each country on the user's itinerary. Those listings get passed through Gemini API, which classifies each one as a match or suspicious result, so we're comparing the same item across countries rather than mismatched listings. From there, we convert every price into the user's chosen currency, apply each country's tourist tax-refund rate, and rank the results.

Challenges we ran into

Having trouble hosting the server for our newly created webapp. Other problems: limitations/stemming from scope decisions, things such as Static tax rates (too inconsistent to implement at our current scope). The lack of shipping and custom rates. As well as missing China (SerpApi not working due to mainland China’s lack of Google usage).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud we were able to finish this on time.

What we learned

Communication is key during moments where time is scarce. As well as the use of sites like GitHub

What's next for BloomKnights-Price Port

Perhaps in the future we will revisit Price Port to incorporate aspects we had to ditch in order to reduce complexity and to save time during the given Hackathon time.