PriceWatch | Devpost

The landing page of PriceWatch
An example consumer search in PriceWatch across dozens of retailers
Dark mode toggle of PriceWatch

Inspiration

During our brainstorming sessions, our team was drawn to the idea of making a meaningful impact in the realm of online shopping. Initially, we contemplated the idea of developing a system to monitor and detect the lowest prices for consumer goods across various e-commerce platforms. However, it became evident that several initiatives were already addressing this challenge. Upon further reflection on the pressing issues in online shopping, we made a resolute choice to tackle the concern of affordability. Our mission became clear: we set out to create a dynamic platform that would empower users to discover the most competitive prices for a wide array of refurbished consumer goods across popular online shopping websites.

What it does

PriceWatch helps provide the lowest possible price for refurbished consumer goods across online shopping websites such as Amazon, Walmart, BestBuy, etc. It functions as a combination of popular product discount sharing websites such as Honey or Slickdeals (extensions that provide user-submitted coupons for specific products on official channels). Using the APIs of these retailers, we are getting data directly without the need of user input. This allows us to find thousands of deals simultaneously that users cannot find anywhere else, and always provide users with real-time alerts about price changes and opportunities to save money during their online shopping experience.

How we built it

We used Typescript as our primary coding language, running on the Node.JS framework. We used the Next.JS frontend framework to power our website app and UI, and a Typescript backend API for grabbing our data and analysis for users. Our historical databases and real time data and search are powered by Algolia, the fastest search engine algorithm, to allow for instant queries for users. For styling the Next.JS app, we used the shorthand CSS library Tailwind.

Challenges we ran into

Obtaining official affiliate keys to get our data from the retailers that we work with, requires a time-intensive process - that we are not able to fully complete in the time window. Due to this, we are using a robust backend to manually collect the data and synchronize it a few times a day.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An accomplishment that we’re proud of is our newfound proficiency Node.js in less than 24 hours. Since most of our team experience was with back-end coding, one of us had to step up to handle the front end. This involved learning a new technology from scratch and basing our entire project around it. At first, it was difficult to learn the file structuring and syntax, and very frustrating as we received many service/request errors, but then everything started to come together.

What we learned

From this workshop, this was a key experience in using a number of new and modern technologies that many of us were not familiar with, such as Algolia and many typescript heavy libraries. Additionally, we were able to get very good experience with virtual team management especially from a perspective of code management and making sure all our team members did not make any conflicting changes.

What's next for PriceWatch

We are seeking to add support for many different retailers, which we have already prepared for by ensuring our project was modular from the start. We would like to implement more data analysis and filtering pipelines for our more advanced users and add potential for AI integrations for product ranking, searching, etc. This would allow us to track important data such as price information over time, providing users with a useful time history of changes to compare different products.