Inspiration
The city of Hyderabad in India has a bustling marketplace. Goods move from wholesale sellers to retail sellers every single day, creating one of the largest supply chains in the country. We have grown up in this environment and believe we can enhance this supply chain with our website, Retail.
What it does
Retail is a website which links wholesale and retail sellers. Let's assume that a retail seller is interested in buying cookies in bulk for his shop. He can log into the website, go to the food section and find a list of people near his location who are interested in selling cookies to him. He will get to see the prices available, what cookies are being sold, contact and other details. Now, he can find a seller, who meets his requirement and then he can order cookies in bulk from him. Now, let's look at the other side, a wholesale seller who sells cookies can get enlisted on this website. He will receive exposure and can make sales with retail sellers. In the present scenario, without technology, it becomes difficult for him to market himself. However, with the website, it becomes much easier. Here, retail acts as a free broker, bringing these 2 sides together and enhancing business for both, in other words, it creates a win-win scenario.
How we built it
Due to the unconventional timeframes (PST is 14.5 hours ahead of IST) and responsibilities from school we created a simple frontend prototype which demonstrates how the site will work. For this, we used google sites and excel sheets as a database for all the buyers and sellers.
Challenges we ran into
With this being our first hackathon, different time zones, a 48 hour timeslot (where we wanted to do everything), demands from school and the fact that none of us actually knew any proper backend or made a project like this, made this project a mess. We struggled to create any proper functionality on the site and spent a good amount of time wondering if we should use Django or Flutter to make this (both of which neither of us knew well and would have had to learn almost from scratch). In the end, we settled to create a front end prototype which is still buggy and couldn't get all the features we wanted. Regardless of how messy or difficult it was, we managed to enjoy the process instead of dread it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
As mentioned before, we enjoyed creating this site. We're proud of the design aesthetic, our attempts to navigate through google sites, the effort we put in to make a live login page which updates the database after an entry. Above all, we're especially proud of getting this website done and not quitting midway and hoping to try out next time.
What we learned
The most important thing we realised while making this website was that though we may be the only 3 decent programmers in our school, we lack several hard skills and have a long way to go. We learnt the development process for software/websites and understood the importance of proper planning. We learnt how we can create a good looking website on google sites with minimal functionality in roughly 10 hours (we would still learn HTML and Django later on). Another thing we learnt is that, if we are interested we can become very productive and efficient.
What's next for Retail
Since we have a rough prototype of the website ready, we're looking to create a mobile app version since phones are easier to use. Once we create a mobile version, we're interested in pitching this idea to a VC in the hopes of creating a start-up. We're not sure if we will manage to complete all the steps but would like to see how far we'd go.
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