SmartCart

Inspiration

Given the current cost of living crisis and general increase in the cost of living in Ireland, we were inspired to make it easier for consumers to shop around and find the best deals during their grocery shop. We hope that these insights will allow consumers to make better choices when purchasing groceries.

What it does

SmartCart aggregates the prices of products from different grocery shops in Ireland and finds the best deals. It allows users to input a full shopping list, and sorts through the products one by one optimising the users' shopping experience. SmartCart also tracks historical pricing, to see which products and supermarkets are increasing in price.

How we built it

SmartCart was built using a Python Flask backend with a Postgres SQL database. The backend utilises different web scraping techniques to access the current price of products. The frontend is made with React and NextJS.

Challenges we ran into

During the initial development phase, we found that some supermarkets had protections in place to prevent bots from accessing their sites. We overcame this challenge by using a patched webdriver which could not be detected by their site.

The main challenge we encountered was when our frontend developer became ill during the hackathon. This left us scrambling to learn JavaScript and React to take over where he left off. We think we did pretty well considering this misfortune.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have produced a project which which will aid people struggling with the cost of living, especially students.

What we learned

Our team had little experience working in team for software development. We each also encountered technologies and languages that we aren't used and learned how to use them within strict time constraints. We learned to use different project management platforms such as Trello to organise our workflow and team.

What's next for SmartCart

We hope that with more users and more data we can provide further insights into the prices of groceries and the different trends that emerge. We plan to leverage this information to reduce the overall cost of living and the burden on consumers and encourage healthy competition among retailers.