We cater convenience good deliveries to your schedule, so you never have to "run to the store" again.
Inspiration
We wanted to develop a convenience shopping app for college students who do not always have the time to run to the store or shop for basic goods. We saw the ads from Amazon Dash, but did not like that customers had to purchase a new piece of hardware for every good, so we packaged it all into one app using Postmates' couriers and powerful API.
After realizing the power of one hour deliveries, our team set upon attaching Postmates to Amazon, with a few fixes to the Amazon Dash model. The Amazon Dash service has a couple flaws, first of which is that it only serves as an issue fixing service, meaning if you end up running out of something, you still have to wait for your order to arrive at least a day or two. However, Postmates Dash is an 'issue prevention' service. It prevents the issue of running out from ever happening. Using the Postmates API, our team created an application to solve all these issues.
What it does
Using the Postmate API, users are able to select favorite items that they want consistently delivered and add them to their dashboard. The app takes in the item details and does a custom google search targeting major department stores using the Custom Google Search API. Afterwards, they can select with what frequency they want delivery (once a month for six months, twice a month for four months) and the application will automatically order the product when it is time. Users can also choose to instantly purchase any time. Before an order is sent, a push notification will be sent so that users can confirm their order.
How I built it
Used Angular JS, Ionic Mobile Framework, wrapped in HTML5 and CSS3 for front end and attached it to a Firebase database.
Challenges I ran into
Our team had issues when initially making requests to the Postmates API because we were making requests from a local host, not another secure location. Additionally, we spent some time trying to decide what payment APIs to implement and what sort of business model would be implemented so that is a business sound idea. Lastly, due to some miscommunication, we had some version control issues that ended up taking some time to fix.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Our team was able to create a lot of the features we envisioned the app having and did not have to hard code them. In addition, we were able to automate some processes using different APIs that make the app a lot more user friendly and aesthetically pleasing.
What I learned
We learned that sometimes it is important and beneficial to pivot mid development. We had to edit our idea as we went due to better ideas or trying to play on our strengths as developers. In addition, we learned that using a large number of APIs can get a bit messy and that keeping very tight surveillance over version control is absolutely critical.
What's next for Postmates Dash
Integrating a great analytics API would be really interesting. It would allow users to get a lot of information that can help them with personal finances or purchasing decisions in the future. Also, writing some algorithms to be able to pool courier requests my geographical region or type of good would greatly increase efficiency.
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