Inspiration
Too many perfectly good products end up in landfills or returned to warehouses due to arbitrary best before labels or overstock. Unlike food products, these are still useable and barely use effectiveness. Inspired by Too Good To Go, we wanted to create a similar solution for non-food products — especially beauty and personal care — which are often wasted despite being safe and useful. Consumers can thus pick up their discounted products at participating stores. We aim to reduce waste while benefiting both consumers and retailers. Unlike existing methods, our approach makes the process more seamless, data-driven, and scalable.
What it does
Our app helps customers discover and pick up discounted personal care products from major retailers like Loblaws, Shoppers Drug Mart, and Walmart. These items are nearing best-before dates or were set to be discarded, but are still perfectly usable. We give them a second life, saving money for users and reducing retail waste. This also helps retailers benefit from excess inventory with minimal effort while also increasing their foot traffic.
On a technical basis, our app is mostly functional and allows for either customer or retailer to log in and use the app. Customers may browse listed items and filter them while retailers may add to this list. Customers can place orders of varying quantity and pay through the app, following which a QR code will be generated. They may present this to the respective retailer and collect their product in person.
Our final app uses CNN to more easily log products and record quantities on the retailer side. This ensures minimal effort and an efficient process. We also track data analytics on the consumer side to predict their needs and recommend products. We also use the data through a linear algorithm to suggest pricing to retailers based on past trends as well as other inputs. Note that these are proposed features and are still being worked on. Integration with the uber app through account linking is also in early stages.
How we built it
We built the initial prototype using Appsmith and Javascript for front end - ensuring a springy and fast experience for users. Springboot with JPA / Hibernate was used to set up Restful APIs that manage our listings and user data. Finally, the back-end is connected to an SQL database for scalability. Retailers use a different portal through the app to upload deal bundles, and customers can browse, reserve, and pick up items via the mobile app.
In terms of validation testing, members of our team manually tested the flows to validate order creation processes, inventory updates, etc. We also chose to simulate some real-world retail scenarios and stress-test the API.
Challenges we ran into
- Designing a workflow that works for both customers and retailers.
- Working with a tight deadline to show off as much of the app as we could.
- Debugging the API at 2am on a Saturday while working on a tight schedule.
Accomplishments that we are proud of
- We have a functional prototype with real-time database updates and working user flows.
- We also have a clean and intuitive UI, designed in-house, which balances functionality for two very different user groups.
- We are proud of the different technologies we integrated into the app, particularly Springboot.
- We have confirmed through technical mentors that our future plans are technically sound and doable.
What we learned
- We learned emotional resilience; despite the stressful environment, we learned to take a step back and critically analyze things.
- Time-management was one of the important things we learned as work had to be distributed efficiently and effectively. We learned to use soft deadlines as well.
- Structuring our back-end for growth taught us about database optimization and API efficiency for real-world applications. We learned a lot about setting up and debugging REST APIs.
- We also learned a tremendous amount about using Appsmith to make apps and using different extensions alongside it. This exposed us to no-code front-end development
What's next for ReVive by Cash Cows
While the competition is still pending, we wish to continue researching this idea and potentially bring it to life. After discussing with mentors, we have realized the ease with which we could scale this project. We are particularly interested in exploring integrations with Uber and Doordash to facilitate delivery. Migrating the back-end to cloud to handle much larger loads is also on our long-term plan. Finally, a carbon savings dashboard would serve to remind users that our enterprise is before all a social one - we are in this to fight wastage
In terms of short-term improvements, we wish to work more on the UI for a better user experience. Additionally, we wish to fully incorporate linear pricing mechanisms to achieve a dynamic pricing model using a few basic inputs. We also would have liked to do more testing.
Built With
- appsmith
- hibernate
- javascript
- jpa
- restapi
- springboot
- sql
