compare 2go

Get the lowest food delivery prices with compare 2go!

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Inspiration

As all UBC students know (and mentioned in nwGuide to Vancouver), food options on campus are not great. But during exam seasons, or hackathons, students often cannot afford to take time to travel off campus for food. So we may resort to food delivery services, but we still need to save as much as we can given our tight budgets. Rather than spending precious time searching for the best prices, which is counter-productive (will we even finish this hackathon project!?), wouldn't it be nice to have a centralized platform where prices from different companies can be easily looked up and compared? Well, this is the drive behind compare 2go!

What it does

Compare 2go, as mentioned before, is a centralized platform where users can look up and compare delivery prices of food they want. Users could first enter their address, then find the restaurant they want, and select specific items (much like a food delivery platform to this point). Once they select an item, instead of purchasing it, the users can see a list of the food delivery services available as well as their corresponding total prices. From here, users can select a specific service, and they will be redirected to the website.

How I built it

We built the front end with vue.js framework, and the backend with node.js using postgresql for our database. We used a variety of tools to build a scraper on the doordash/skipthedishes websites in order to get the cost of the items, available items, the delivery fees, etc. as there were no open APIs. With the scraper, we send the data to our backend which saves it to a database, and then pulled to the front-end to display.

Challenges I ran into

Scraping for menu data is hard, especially when the websites have different UI and sometimes even different menu structure.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Sat by the door (issa cold), sat on the hard bench the whole hackathon, met new people, created the UI from scratch in the timespan.

What I learned

Sleeping is not an option, we should bring our own food next time, many people are sick/getting sick.

What's next for compare 2go

Use it during the next hackathon, weed out all the bad restaurants at UBC, improve the food delivery scene in Vancouver, end world hunger, what else can we do? On a more serious note, we want to build it so that we can scrape for specific restaurant data real-time (since they depend on the addresses entered). And also take into account coupons (such as free delivery over x amount) to make the process even more streamlined.

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