The problem ShopSquad solves

There are 2 major problems that we see in the present online shopping experience which we intend to solve through this project :

Until now, online shopping has been lonely. It’s brought the benefits of accessing a wide variety of products with the convenience of being shipped to your door -- but it’s stripped out all human connection.

There are numerous fundamental challenges with online buying that businesses must overcome to remain competitive in today's market. Virtual try-on technology lets customers see how clothes fit themselves or an avatar, allowing them to virtually “try on” clothing before purchasing them. In real life, fitting rooms are the heart of the shopping experience. Changing clothes and accessories creates a level of intimacy between a brand and consumer.

With ShopSquad, our users can go shopping with their friends and hang out at the same time. You can play games together and use the prizes to get discounts on group order.

ShopSquad provides the ability to make groups and have a common cart within the group. Users in the group can share products, get feedback and validation, like or dislike an item, chat within the group and make payment. Each user can add item along with their address which will be delivered to them. That’s great during COVID-19 and great after COVID-19.

ShopSquad also provides the see how a product looks on the user before actually buying it. Broadly speaking, the end goal of our project here was to implement a virtual try-on network — essentially taking in-shop clothing and a person image as input to give output as an image of a person wearing those clothes and providing an in-built social chat application to enable users shop along with their family & friends with the comfort of being at home (social distancing in these dare times). The model implemented has been done with a focus on tops, with complete apparel transfer being potential future work.

Challenges we ran into

We had to take some time to understand the CNN model that we are using for Virtual-Try On. We were completely new to this and it took sometime to integrate it with our project.
Due to time constraint we couldn't implement group chat completely, and had some trouble using Redis on a windows system.