LocalAlt
LocalAlt - A Platform to make products at your local store, visible to you online.
Created on 5th November 2023
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LocalAlt
LocalAlt - A Platform to make products at your local store, visible to you online.
The problem LocalAlt solves
- Consider a scenario when you order a cloth online and it gets delivered to you in 4 to 5 days then you find that it is not worth of the amount that you have paid for the product or you simply did not like the quality or size of the product then you need to replace exchange or return the product and order a new one this cycle takes around 12 to 15 days and with an uncertainty of the quality of the product so there should be a solution to browse the products available at your local nearby stores. This is where we come in, the problems we aim to solve are:
- Makes the inventory of the local stores visible to you online: enabling you to compare products and prices.
- Quality and worth of the products can easily be assessed when buying it offline.
- You may get a better deal at the local store compared to online, you will be aware of the local deals through this platform.
- Empowers local shop owners to get visibility to the generation who is always online: driving them better sales.
- Users will be able to easily browse products, compare prices, and transition between online ordering and in-store shopping.
- Stores will be able to showcase their inventory to a wider audience.
- Another key problem in current e-commerce setup is the return of orders, it usually is a very big ordeal for the big retailers and the biggest pain point when it comes to cash burn, we adopt the hyperlocal model where one can simply walk-in (we take them to the exact location of the store) and make the purchase offline or show intent on our website.
Challenges we ran into
- The major challenge while building this was deciding what to build first, we came up with multiple ideas, and some ideas were good enough to publish papers on (well, that we all thought while proposing our hacks :P) so after lengthy discussion and hour-long deliberation, we decided to address one of the biggest challenge for which there is no organised solution we started to build LocalAlt.
- We are a team of 4, Aryan and Pushker decided to back their strengths and worked on the Backend, while Nakul and Rishik went forward and built the frontend. The major issue was in between, joining the frontend to the backend. We ran into multiple issues, multiple pesky bugs, and ran into conflicts, we sat from the same dorm room, with all our laptops, whiteboards, electronics and bunch of papers.
- One interesting thing that happened was that we had the route ready for fetching the local products after filtering the location but at 6.30AM of 5th November, the frontend folks told that it isn't working. On barely 2 hours of sleep and a lot of coffee, we took this challenge head on and Voila! At 8AM, it worked, we made the last commit and it worked like a charm!
- To be honest, we weren't able to fully integrate all the features within the time limit, but we learnt it the hard way, that the tougher the problem you choose, the tougher trade-offs we have to make.
- Another problem that we ran into was that initially we took the call to go without a Figma design which penultimately resulted in multiple rounds of changing color themes. Which drained a lot of time.
- Well, our team is very closely knitted and we know each other for an upward of 5 years, yet, to our surprise, we find it difficult to have pin point coordination every Hackathon.
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