Local Buys

Landing Page
Shopper Page
Scrolling view of products
Signing up as a business
Adding products

Inspiration

Covid-19 has impacted our lives in unimaginable ways. A lot of people decided to take advantage of the situation and use their spare time at home to create small businesses. However, this is not easy considering many of those businesses are one man operations. That is where Local Buys comes into play, since we help local shops display and deliver the products they make. This allows more entrepreneurs to take a chance in trying something new, without having to worry about building a website or product page. Moreover, this helps local businesses compete with big box stores like Walmart and Target as they have been more prevalent during this pandemic as it is now just as easy to find products for a wide variety of categories on our website (especially in North America).

What it does

This web application has two services. From the merchant side, you can sign up as a business with your company. From there, you can upload products with their category, price, inventory and an image.

As a customer, you can browse through products located in your community. Using filters such as category and price range, you can narrow it down to your specific taste to find products you want. Once you find products, simply add them to the cart, and purchase them.

How we built it

Started building the web application using a Creative Tim template (Material Kit Pro). Initially designed bare html pages for the landing page, business page and shopping page. Then generated fake data locally as JavaScript objects in order to simulate a backend storage, which allowed for fast iteration on the frontend. The JavaScript code includes classes that represent the data model, which made it easy to generate fake businesses and products. Finally integrated with Google Firestore in order to store and fetch data as required.

Challenges we ran into

Building a functional web application with a good user interface in limited time is a challenging task. Fortunately with the use of a Creative Tim template designing nice looking pages was made easier. However, some more specific challenges include designing the pages, working with Google Firebase to store and retrieve data and storing images. Firebase has good documentation which made debugging a little easier, but there were times when things did not work as intended. Storing images was a little tricky, but we were able to find a quick hack to get us moving faster, which involved storing the images as a base64 string in Firestore.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of going through the whole process to build LocalBuys. We both learned quite a bit through this process as it was the first time using Google Firebase for one of us. Moreover, we believe that the final product being hosted on a custom domain is very clean and user friendly, which is something we are especially proud of considering the time constraints.

What we learned

Learned how to build an elegant web application in a short period of time that provides functional features.
Learned how to use Google Firestore.
Collaboration is key in order for the team to formalize product requirements and actually implement them according to the specification.