SucSeed

Chrome extension that aims to empower small businesses by leveraging large marketplaces like Amazon to increase visibility and exposure of small businesses to customers.

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Inspiration

COVID-19 pandemic is hurting small businesses all around us. Two of the biggest concerns for small businesses that we identified are lack of exposure and long term support from customers. First, we noticed that many small to medium businesses are struggling to stay afloat because they are overshadowed by larger corporations like Amazon, making it harder for customers to discover and support them. Secondly, we wanted a mechanism to encourage customers to continue supporting small businesses in the long term.

What it does

To solve the two problems, we developed a Chrome Extension that presents customers with similar products offered by small businesses when they shop for products through Amazon. Our extension drives sales for small vendors, which might make a huge impact in helping them survive. It has fast and easy transactional flow. For those who want to support small businesses but don’t have time to fully research, our extension is a convenient way for them to discover small businesses and show their support.

We also developed an incentive system that rewards customers when they shop through our platform. While the customer makes purchases, they plant a seed and watch it grow along with their contributions. When the trees “grow” to a new stage, coins will be rewarded that can be spent at the rewards shop to buy prizes such as discounts from our participating vendors. You can also browse and view these vendors, keep track of your past purchases as well as see your progress over time. This further incentivize customers to maintain a long term relationship with our vendors and businesses.

How we built it

SucSeed is a Chrome Extension developed with React as the frontend, Firebase as the database, and bill.com API as the payment and transactional method.

Challenges we ran into

Using the bill.com API and setting up the chrome extension were things that we weren't familiar with, so we ran into a couple issues. Fortunately, all of the mentors for bill.com were extremely helpful and responsive, so we were able to figure it out and fully integrate with the bill.com API for our end result!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to finish the majority of the functionalities that we wanted for our chrome extension (we actually finished more than we expected :) )! We're also really proud that our solution works to solve two different but integral problems that small businesses are currently facing. We're happy to be able to enrich our community by supporting small businesses.

What's next for SucSeed

We have many ideas to further expand on our extension. The biggest feature that we definitely want to add is sorting the businesses by locality closest to the user so that they can easily support the local businesses in their community.

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