Inspiration
It was my moms birthday a few weeks ago and I only remembered that I needed to get her a gift the day before. I live far away so I always need to either order something online or give a voucher. This time it was too late to get something shipped on time, so I got her a digital voucher for the local movie theatre in my hometown (a tip from my sister). I was really happy that the theatre had a website that I could buy a voucher on. Often for smaller, local shops this is not an option, especially if they do not even have a website. Best case you need to go there in person and get a hand written voucher. I was thinking how nice it would be if more local shops would be able to sell gift vouchers online in a simple way for which they don't need any digital skills or resources. I thought Square offers exactly the APIs needed to make a solution for this, that's why I decided to build VoucherLauncher.
What it does
1) Register your business on https://emelieh21.shinyapps.io/voucher-launcher/. You will be ask to a sign up or log in via Auth0. To register a business you will need to fill in few details, add your companies logo, click "ok" and your ready to go. After this you will be provided a QR code and a link to the page of your business on https://emelieh21.shinyapps.io/voucher-launcher-open/ that you can share e.g. via your facebook page, your website, or just print and put on your shops window. Via this QR code or url people can buy vouchers for your shop. 2) When someone buys a voucher to your business, they also get a QR code. The business can scan this code with any QR code scanning app and it will take them to the page where they can see the value of the voucher and redeem credit from it when it is being used. This way vouchers can only be used once and malignant use can be avoided.
How we built it
The application is build with R shiny and published on shinyapps.io. The Square payment API and gift voucher API were used for the functionality of the applicaiton.
Challenges we ran into
- I had a bit of confusion on how to integrate the Square Payments API into my R shiny app. I decided that since this demo application would remain in the sandbox anyways and no actual payments would be made, it was fine that at least on the UI level the integration worked. On the other hand, integrating the Square Gift Voucher API went very smooth. Using the API explorer really helped getting it to work in my application quickly.
- I found it difficult to figure out a way to deal with Square accounts that would not per se be my own business account (as my applications' purpose is to use Square APIs for other businesses). I wanted to make it as easy as possible for businesses to use VoucherLauncher (e.g. by just asking them to put their IBAN number for the payments), but I was not sure if this is actually possible. I wanted to avoid at all costs that businesses would have to create a developer account and get an API key by themselves, because this would probably scare people off.
- I wanted to use Twilio API for sending emails, but due to changes in their conditions I could sadly not get it to work anymore during this hackathon. If I will hear back from them and get the issue solved, I will still try to implement the email feature (as it is quite important the customers actually receive their vouchers in their mailbox...)
Accomplishments that we're proud of
That we ended up with an actually functional Sandbox application :)
What we learned
That it was very easy to explore the Square APIs with the "API explorer". I really enjoyed getting familiar with the gift voucher API.
What's next for VoucherLauncher
I hope a real life application as VoucherLauncher will be released at some point soon, because I would be happy to use it myself :)
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