Inspiration
Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact on local businesses. We wanted to build a simple and beautiful e-commerce platform for local businesses without an online presence. This helps them get engaged with their community and those close by in order to still get their essential products out the door into the hands of their local buyers. It is advisable for people to not leave their homes during the epidemic, and to get supplies of essential items, it is important it can be home delivered. The small business owners don't have an online presence. But we wanted to create a simple application which can help them get online and also bring in people who can deliver the products at doorsteps.
What it does
Stash allows local small businesses owners to register, upload their inventory, and have their items filtered to buyers based on their location. We use the store's address and the buyer's address in order to determine the closest items to the buyer. Our algorithm then sorts the essential items based on proximity. Once items are purchased from multiple stores, the orders for the items are displayed to the shop owners in form of clusters based on the location of the orders, this is done such it that orders from a same area can be delivered together to save time and logistics for the shop owners, owners of close-by stores can use just use one delivery service to ship the items.
This helps reduce on cost, maintain social distancing and still get items to local buyers.
How I built it
We built the app using react for the front-end, with express supporting the backend. We use a Mongo DB cluster for data persistence and use the Google Maps API for geolocation.
Challenges I ran into
Making an e-commerce platform, no matter how small, is still very difficult. We had trouble narrowing down the scope of the business needs. For the technical side, we had trouble with building the database schema and also the logic for the geolocation calculation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Working with a bunch of folks that we've never met before in order to come up with an idea, prototype and a business plan.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.