ShopVoyant

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  Know Before you Shop

Inspiration

During the early days of the CoVID-19 pandemic, many essential goods were in short supply at local retailers, and it was exceedingly difficult and treacherous to go out and try to find what you were looking for. We thought of ShopVoyant as a way for local retailers to document the availability and pricing of their merchandise so that shoppers can know where to go to buy their essential goods. This means that shoppers would no longer need to aimlessly roam around different shops, which could also help contain the virus spread.

What it does

ShopVoyant is an iOS app that allows the user to search for product listings, pricing, and availability within the user's neighborhood stores. It also allows neighborhood stores to create and update product listings for users to see.

How we built it

We built ShopVoyant with an iOS app frontend using SWIFT. The backend APIs were done in node.js with a MySQL database hosted using Firebase Cloud Functions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a team with 2 new hackathon participants, we are very proud that we were able to work together as a team, share knowledge, and get the project finished before the deadline.

What we learned

We learned how to interact with backend APIs via the frontend iOS app.

What's next for ShopVoyant

For the next steps, we wanted to add a crowdsourced inventory/price verification feature, which would be an additional verification layer for the product listings. This would help prevent retailers from abusing the system and would encourage them to maintain the realtime accuracy of the listings.

Built With

• firebase
• mysql
• node.js
• swift