Inspiration
As Covid-19 ravaged the world economy, social distancing measures implemented has hindered the ability of social enterprises to reach their target audience. Additionally, as many shifted their business online, we felt that mainstream E-commerce platforms were unsuitable for social enterprises to connect with their target audience as these platforms cater to the price-sensitive customers. We thus decided to bring together the community of socially responsible enterprises and consumers on a single platform in order to enable social enterprises to share their passion and more effectively engage their target audience. We believe that this will help increase their social footprint and make them more resilient.
What it does
The website serves as an E-commerce platform where social enterprises can create their company profile and list their products using the Enterprise App. Through connecting social enterprises with their target audience, this platform seeks to help social enterprises better engage the community, share their passion and amplify their impact. In doing so, we hope to help social enterprises gain traction online and become more resilient.
This can serve as an add on to the current raiSE network infrastructure i.e website and addition of a mobile app.
How we built it
We made the main E-commerce site using wordpress and the woocommerce plugin which greatly reduced the workload. In order to enable individual social enterprises to customise their profile and seamlessly list their products, we built an Enterprise app using flutter which enabled cross platform integration across mobile and desktop platforms. This app was deployed using firestore and firebase hosting.
To enable the platform to support a large number of social enterprises, we had to enable communication between the two platforms so that transmission of information can be automated. We did so using Zapier which is a middleware to help run functions on the wordpress site when triggered by the flutter app.
Challenges we ran into
- Woocommerce integration with firebase was lacking. This made interaction between the Enterprise app and the E-commerce platform difficult.
- As two of us do not have much experience with using technology to build solutions, we stumbled multiple times and had to spend a lot of time and effort figuring out how things work. For instance, it was rather time consuming for us to figure out how firebase worked and how it was going to be integrated with the site. However, it is absolutely necessary for us to understand this before moving on to the next phase of our project
- Getting https to work. Between signing certs and configuring domain names, there were a surprising number of steps and services to interact with to get https to work.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- First hackathon for majority of our team
- Made our first PWA
- Along the way, there were many challenges that we faced. We are proud that we were able to work together to find solutions
What we learned
- While building a shop for individual businesses is relatively simple, we found it challenging to do so for a platform with the intention to cater to multiple businesses. We learnt that the use of automation and dynamic pages is absolutely necessary for larger scale platforms. This gave us some insight into how ecommerce platforms such as Amazon and Lazada make use of automation to integrate their database with their platforms.
- We often hear about the potential of technology but we seldom get the opportunity to truly appreciate how technology can help with the backend of operations. Embarking on this project helped us see the necessity of technology and how proper integration can enable seamless and accurate transmission of data.
What's next for riSE
- More features can be added to the Enterprise App to give the social enterprises more control over their profiles.
- Creation of a page where social enterprises can share their stories and areas of impact in order to better engage the community
- Possible integration together with the raiSE SG Business4Good directory so that social enterprises can more effectively spread their message
- Enable social enterprises to offer services on the platform as well
- Optimising of website (Better sorting and classification for products etc)
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