The problem ShopHood solves

1. Local business owners (especially women entrepreneurs) lack exposure of their small businesses due to societal constraints, almost zero recognition among customers, and big e-commerce houses.

2. The small businesses in the local neighbourhoods find difficulty in acquiring intial customers or scaling their business.

3. Normal consumers have to spend a lot of time looking for customised help suited to their needs, like - a good tailor for tight deadlines or for an event or house helps nearby.

Apart from the already mentioned points above , we see our project as a feasible method to generate employment and facilitate the empowering of small local businesses and women entrepreneurs by providing no fee transactions while using our app. We hereby firmly believe that our app also solves 2 of the major UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals namely : Women Empowerment (Tackling Gender Disparity) and Employment Generation.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges during the entirety of the development process, some of them were -

1. We had trouble with the data modelling of the app in firebase.
2. We had deployment issues of the backend in GCP, which was later resolved.
3. Apart from this, there were stability issues within the flutter codebase, which was also resolved within due course of time during the development.
4. Implementing the UI using flutter libraries
5. Implementing and auto detecting user's accurate location during signup.
6. Implementing dynamic geofencing in the app.