ShopAround

Inspiration

Just a day before the day we had to leave for the Hack This Fall 3.0. One of our team member needed a pair of lower and Tshirt for wearing it at the time of the Hackathon. We needed it in urgent, So there was no chance to go for online ordering it. Also, when we went to retail stores nearby we found that there we can try out the clothes and also check the quality which was again not possible in online market. There we realised that there are some factors where offline store beat the online e-commerce sites. But still we had to roam through 8-10 shops just to get the desired set of clothes. There another realisation hit us that retail market being so large is somewhere lacking behind because of online stores and user is also finding it hard to go through each shop to get the desired product in desired rates. That's where we came up with our Idea "Shop Around" to make it easy to shop for the things we want in a convenient way.

What it does

We have come up with the platform called ShopAround where buyer can search and filter the nearby shops which sell the desired products. It is a location-based shopping app with product-wise searching. ShopAround overcomes the issues faced by consumers while shopping online.Suppose a boy named Rishi want to buy a Tshirt but he don't know at which nearby shop he can get his desired product. Here ShopAround comes into the picture. He just have to search for desired product on ShopAround and can get the list of shops where his desired product is available.

Now he can compare the price of the product and contact to the vendor where we get our desired product and rates. Also he can try out things before purchase and be satisfied with the product quality and product information.

How we built it

Shop Around is basically a Native Android Application which is developed using Java and XML. The Software we used to build the project is Android Studio. Then, for the Backend service provider we used Firebase, which provided us with Authentication, Real-time No SQL database and Cloud Storage. We have also used many libraries in android just to make an elegant User Interface, some of those libraries are nl.joery.animatedbottombar:library:1.1.0, com.github.bumptech.glide:glide:4.12.0, etc.

Also, we have used ApyHub which is one of the sponsors of HackThisFall 3.0. We used ApyHub for its seamless APIs like Email Validation and Pincode Validation.

Challenges we ran into

The major challenge we ran into was to perform image based searching, but still we found a way to execute it by the use of Firebase and Microsoft Azure.

Even after the production of the application, our major challenge is to spread the product. The product have the capabilities because it is making life better for a user as well as a business owner. For the application to work we have to market for taking Vendors onBoard in the initial stage of the Application Production.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The accomplishment which we are proud of is that we are giving a scope of growth to the retail market place which faced a lot of loss because of online markets. Also, we are allowing the user to buy what he/she wants wether its a clothing item, cosmetic, footwear, etc. User can try the things, check the quality and pay for what he wants and in this case they don't need to wait for days to get the product also they don't have to go through any complex refund or replacement policies.

What we learned

We learned how we can use different different API provider to come together and work simultaneously on a single project and boosting its efficiency. We also learned how to perform network calls on Firebase to perform CRUD operations on the data. Also, we learned about the ML libraries provided by Firebase and Microsoft Azure.

What's next for ShopAround

For the Future aspect of ShopAround we have thought to integrate with a delivery partner to make the shopping through retail easiest. Shop Around is just like Zomato but not for food, it is a Zomato for every other thing we need in our daily lives from clothes, cosmetics to Kirana, Medecines, etc.