Inspiration
PointsPal aims to help support our small local businesses. Technology has revolutionised and transformed industries. We've all witness how mega-companies have benefitted immensely from the integration of technology to their daily businesses. Be it streamlining management processes, or boosting customer engagement.
The sad truth is that our local businesses simply cannot afford to invest in such technology due to financial and resource constraints. PointsPal wants to help solve this problem and help our local businesses tap into the powers of technology as well.
By creating a centralised on-stop application, we want to be able to onboard small businesses into our application.
What it does
Primarily, PointsPal is a loyalty application, allowing businesses to easily set up loyalty programs, such as being able to
- Create loyalty cards and issue stamps
- Create and track membership tiers
- Offer and manage discounts
How we built it
PointsPal is a mobile-friendly web-app built with Flask and React (and a postgres database). It integrates sgID authentication for easy sign up and sign in.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge for this hackathon was working on a time-crunch. As we all had other commitments alongside the hackathon, we could only spend about 12 hours developing the app entirely from scratch. This forced us to learn how to work under time pressure and pick things up fast. For instance, it was our first time working with the python ORM tool Peewee, and working with sgID integration.
Time Constraint: One of the primary constraints during LifeHack 2023 is limited time. Participants must develop innovative ideas, design, develop, and implement them into a functional solution within a short period. Balancing this tight deadline with quality output is challenging for all team members.
Unfamiliar with Back-End Development: Some participants might be more experienced in front-end development but less skilled in back-end development. This can create inefficiencies, and the team might need to rely on a few members to handle back-end tasks. Overcoming this roadblock involves learning new technologies and languages quickly, as well as an appropriate delegation of tasks within the team.
Implementing Single Sign-On with SGID: Implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions like Singapore's SGID can be challenging, as it requires a thorough understanding of the integration process and handling various aspects like authentication flows and security. Inexperienced team members may struggle to accurately set up and manage the required dependencies and configurations.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
SGID: We effectively integrated the Single Sign-On (SSO) solution, Singapore's SGID, into our platform. The SGID login provides users with a seamless, secure authentication process, allowing them to access the platform using their existing credentials without undergoing a separate registration process.
Landing Page: We implemented the landing page to display the available merchants that users can choose to subscribe to their loyalty programme. Users who already subscribed can then open the merchant page and to find out more about the benefits and details of the merchant's loyalty programme. In addition, we have integrated a search query for user to filter out the desired merchants.
Merchant Page: We develop a customised merchant page where users are able to find out more details of the merchant (description, location, rating, reviews), discounts available as well as an interactive flippable card that contains details of the user's loyalty card and membership tiers.
What we learned
Our biggest challenge for this hackathon was working on a time-crunch. As we all had other commitments alongside the hackathon, we could only spend about 12 hours developing the app entirely from scratch. This forced us to learn how to work under time pressure and pick things up fast. For instance, it was our first time working with the python ORM tool Peewee, and working with sgID integration.
Together, we faced challenges, rapidly learned new skills, and leveraged one another's strengths to turn our vision into reality. We are proud of the product we've achieved and look forward to the opportunity to continue refining and expanding upon our idea in the future.
What's next for PointsPal
Eventually, we want to make PointsPal more powerful by
- Allowing merchants to set up e-stores through which customers can order through
- Facilitate payments
- Allow 'salesforce'-like customisation and management of individual store pages by individual merchants
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