SmartMart

Inspiration

Online shopping is boring. No one likes scrolling through pages and pages of products to find what you want to buy. We set out to create an online store that is smart and adaptive to economic insights around a consumer's region, supplying the buyer with the best options of products to purchase. Greatly simplying the cumbersome online shopping experience; making it easier, quicker, and seamless.

What it does

We use Bloomberg's economic insights (e.g. buyer confidence, unemployment, mean income, dairy production) to recommend products that appeal to the average consumers in a specific region. By doing so, the user experience is simplified and enhanced. Instead of showing multiple brands of the same product, the store can promote the brand that has the highest retention. Smartmart will also promote certain deals and loyalty programs to maximize sales.

How I built it

First, we pull 10 years worth of economic data from Bloomberg's API such as consumer confidence and unemployment rates. We then analyze the data and discover trends to assess current and future economic standings the user's region. With these assessments we're able to specifically recommend certain brands of products based on price, deals, and quality (e.g. low buyer confidence = cheaper savings upfront, low risk items promoted). The backend was built in Node & Express, the frontend was built in Angular & a couple other libraries.

Challenges I ran into

We had trouble finding the best use case of the plethora of data supplied by Bloomberg's API. When we finally decided on a use case, we had challenges analyzing trends and making conclusions from our data. During the last few hours we were rate limited due to querying 10 years of data at a time. Luckily we cached a local version of the Bloomberg db beforehand, so we were able to access that directly from memory.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're proud that we were able to take on Bloomberg's challenge and make something so cool using of data they provide. We feel that our project has the ability to simplify the online shopping experience for buyers.

What I learned

We learned alot about large data anayltics and the power that data holds. We are excited to work with more big datasets in the future.

What's next for SmartMart

SmartMart is a proof of concept of online stores that adapt to macro economic insights. In the future, there will be rich and percise microeconomic data and from there we want to be able to suggest resturaunts, products, entertainment, etc based on your location and small-scale, fast-changing data.