ShopSmart

A chrome extention built to prevent impulse spending on e-commerce sites.

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Inspiration: While doing market research, we learnt that 40% of all e-commerce sales online were as a result of impulse spending. What was alarming about this was that roughly half of impulse buys were regretted after the purchase.

We realized this meant a lot of people were wasting money on products they did not gain utility from, meaning that they had less money to spend on other, more fulfilling things, thus reducing their quality of life. Ergo, we wanted to build something that can fix that.

What we learnt: While going through this hackathon, we learnt about the FinTech industry as well as how to build a whole chrome extension from scratch. We also spent a lot of time focusing on the UX experience, as the easier the extension is to use, the more people will use it. This led us to create a very minimal layout, containing the fewest elements possible.

How we built it: Chrome extensions are built using a JSON file, as well as pure HTML, CSS, & JS, which was our whole stack.

Features:

  1. Lets you set a budget and track it in the Scotia connect mobile banking.
  2. If you want to order something that's not an impulse buy, you have to type in "This is not an impulse buy" explicitly to order the product. This reminds the user of their budgeting goals as well as creating positive reinforcements of good spending habits.
  3. Gently reminds users of their budget while viewing their cart, at checkout, and after their order is complete.
  4. Often times, companies promote impulse buying by advertising "sales" that are actually common prices for the product. Therefore, the extension shows you the history of the product's prices in order to confirm that the user is actually getting a good deal.
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