Quick Pickup!

Helping local businesses during the pandemic!

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Inspiration

We're from India and we're facing the 2nd wave of COVID-19. Many states have been imposing lockdowns and stores in the region are only allowed to stay open till 12 noon. This causes a lot of people crowding at the store, bringing down the effectiveness of the lockdown. Since stores are open for only half a day, they also bring a lot less revenue than usual.

What it does

Our project is an ordering platform comprised of two parts. Firstly, we created a WhatsApp bot that people can easily use to place orders at the store. The customers send the required items along with the quantity to the WhatsApp bot and then place their order. Secondly, we created a portal for store managers to view the orders and get orders packed and ready for the customer. Once the order is packed, the customer is notified and can pick up their order the next day.

How our project fixes the problems outlined above:

  • Higher revenue: Now that people can order directly from the comfort from their homes, this is definitely going to see a higher rise of purchases.
  • Less exposure to COVID-19: Since people do not actually enter the store for a prolong period of time, there's much less exposure to the virus.

How we built it

The WhatsApp bot was built using Twilio's WhatsApp API, and was interfaced using python. The order platform website was built python and flask, with Fomantic-UI and css-doodle for the amazing site design. Both the bot and the website was hosted using the Google cloud platform.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges that we faced was verifying ourselves on WhatsApp to get acces to their Business API. Luckily for us, Twilio has a feature called WhatsApp Sandbox which eliminates the need to verify ourselves with WhatsApp.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud of how good the website looks. We also loved the way that our user interface turned out to be especially the tooltips and the way we got the WhatsApp bot to work.

What we learned

  • We've built telegram and discord bots before, but this is the very first time we've been exposed to the WhatsApp bot platform. With Twilio, it was definitely quite a breeze, and it's quite a handy skill to have in our tool box.
  • We learned how to use css-doodle to generate awfully nice-looking backgrounds for webpages :)

What's next for Quick Pickup!

There's a lot left to implement, including more features like allowing the customer to change an order after they've placed it, or maybe integrating a payments processor. Whatever the case, this is definitely not the end of the road!

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