The Travelling Grocer

landingpage
Map with working pathing
dashboard
working shopping list
auth

Inspiration

Time is a resource we all fall short of. Picking up groceries can be time intensive, and sometimes even anxiety-inducing trying to find out where everything is! Our goal with The Travelling Grocer is to make grocery shopping more accessible for people short on time or too socially anxious to ask for help.

What it does

Users simply search for all the items on their shopping list, and our web app’s algorithm finds and displays an efficient route through a given grocery store to help users find items as fast as possible. Owners of these grocery stores can also authenticate themselves to access a database where they can edit the inventory at their store.

How we built it

We used Mappedin for the map visualization, Angular and Tailwind for the frontend, MongoDB for the backend, and Auth0 for authentication.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to manage our ambitious ideas throughout the competition and as a result, our attention was split between widely different tasks. Integrating MappedIn’s map view into our webpage and figuring out what algorithm we would use for grocery pathfinding were two very time-consuming initial hurdles. Combining everything at the end was especially challenging as connecting individual working parts of our full-stack app sometimes led to unexpected errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of combining so many technical elements like database management, authentication protocols, path-finding algorithms, digital map integration, and overall full-stack web development into one 24-hour project.

What we learned

With the help of Colwyn and Aditya, Parm and Eric learned how to write and organize front end code for Mongo-Express-Angular-Node (MEAN) web applications. Aditya learned a lot about backend CORS and security, while Colwyn learned about authentication protocols for the first time. All of us dealt with merge conflicts, having to read documentation, and front-end back-end interaction.

What's next for The Traveling Grocer

Our app could be further developed by improving the UX and UI of all web pages as well as implementing AI suggestions to propose similar products in the item search bar. To monetize our app, we could charge a small fee for store owners to have us create a digital map of their store containing all their products, as an accessibility tool like this would help increase their customer base. With these businesses in mind, we would also need to implement a way to select a specific store with Google Maps’ API and put more attention into ease of use for editing store inventory.