Inspiration
When brainstorming ideas, we came upon the fact that when shopping for a product, you're forced to purchase different types of items on different websites. For example, you might purchase clothes from Amazon, but get your shoes from eBay. Our program helps if you're searching for a niche product, looking for budget options, or just want to buy a variety of different items!
What it does
Our program scrapes data from popular shopping websites based on the user's search term, and returns multiple products from each website. For example, a user who searches 'shoes' on the program will be shown a variety of shoes being sold on eBay, Amazon, and more.
How we built it
We built our program in Java, using an automation API called Selenium. We used a separate class to search for the product on each e-commerce website, which are all accessed from the main method.
Challenges we ran into
Our first challenge was trying to find an API that would accommodate our project. We tried many Python and Java-based APIs, and after we settled on using Selenium with Java, we still encountered numerous bugs during the programming process. This included Selenium detecting and outputting non-relevant images, mismatching prices with product names, errors with price ranges, and more.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the work we put into our now operational prototype, and how well we adapted when we ran into problems. We overcame the challenges we met by problem-solving as a team, coming together to make our project work.
What we learned
We learned the nuances of the selenium API, as well as how to web scrape efficiently. In addition, we learned how to code in HTML and CSS, which we used to build our website.
What's next for UltraShop
Some next steps will be migrating this program to a website with a friendlier UX, and making it more similar to an ecommerce website rather than a list.
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