Shop-Around | Devpost

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Inspiration

With the goal of empowering retailers to compete with online giants while satisfying consumer needs through NCR’s technology, Shop-Around is reinventing the shopping experience, one step at a time. When consumers go shopping, they are generally unaware of product prices. They hope to land at the best store with the cheapest and most affordable products, but it's all a mystery until they’re in the aisle. Shop-Around is looking to innovate the way retailers and consumers interact, all while relying on NCR's unbiased role as a middleman, helping all entities take advantage of open data.

What it does

The purpose of our strategy is to direct our customers to purchase their desired goods at the lowest price available at local retail stores. Our application will monitor a customer’s specific shopping trends and build a predicted basket of goods, designed to meet the customer’s needs. Through crowdsourcing and the data analysis of daily transactions that go through NCR’s hardware, our application will advise the customer to go to the store where the total basket can be bought for the cheapest price, which will both increase savings for the customer while providing advertising and an increase in customers to the retailers.

How I built it

Before we began to program our idea and bring it to life, we spent time heavily thinking about the stakeholders, the competitive advantages we had, and purpose of our application. In addition to creating a business model, we designed two algorithms through mathematical analysis. After mapping out the logic and architecture of our application, we built our product from scratch utilizing JavaScript and Python. We also built a server using Azure.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge we faced while building our product was that we had to design the algorithms to be robust to different edge cases in the data. Additionally, we structured our algorithms to work well for retail data, but later found out that the APIs we wanted to work with were structured for restaurants.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

What we are most proud of was our ability to think critically and come up with the detailed algorithms whose output matched our expectations. The first algorithm that we developed had the purpose of checking consumer receipts and inferring a consumer’s regular basket of goods. The second algorithm we designed compares the price of the consumer's basket at all of the retail stores in the area. We are very proud of our abilities to dive into both the business and technical aspects of our idea.