Store Hub

Store Hub is a groundbreaking solution for businesses looking to effortlessly establish an online presence.

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💡 Inspiration

In Africa, many small businesses heavily rely on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter as their primary means of reaching customers. However, this limited online presence hampers their ability to connect with a broader audience.

This hackathon project aims to develop a web application that enables business owners to effortlessly launch their businesses online with a single click.

⚙ What it does

Store Hub is a groundbreaking solution for businesses looking to effortlessly establish an online presence. With just a single click, you can launch an e-commerce store, co-own the store with friends, and gain unparalleled business insights and analytics to help your business thrive in the online marketplace.

Our platform leverages the power of blockchain technology to guarantee the integrity of your online store. We utilize the NEAR blockchain, known for its user-friendly, carbon-neutral, secure, and infinitely scalable characteristics. NEAR provides a foundation for an e-commerce solution that is performant and secure, ensuring that your business operations are seamless and reliable.

🛠 How we built it

First, we spent a good amount of time ideating with our designer on the problem and solution we were building. This helped her bring the ideas to life through her designs on Figma.

For the Frontend part of the project, we chose Next.js + Typescript to optimize our application by leveraging on its lazy loading, caching mechanisms, and static typing. This results in better performance and faster load times for our users. Also, as an e-commerce domain, we leverage Next.js's Built-in Image Optimization to serve the images in modern formats and lazy-loading them to improve page performance. For the UI, we used TailwindCSS for its built-in support for responsive design. This helped us to quickly build responsive pages for our users.

On the backend, we used Go for implementing the server, Postgres for the database, and Redis for caching and as a queue for processing tasks asynchronously. We utilized the Render.com platform to deploy and host the server, database, and Redis. We used OpenAPI specification and Swagger for API documentation.

For the smart contract, we leveraged the NEAR Blockchain for its secure and scalable foundation for our online stores. We wrote the smart contract with Rust, leveraging on it secure and safe nature as a language to ensure the integrity of our smart contract on the blockchain.

💪 Challenges we ran into

First challenge we faced was authenticating each user with the Near wallet and on the backend. Since the only flow the users are introduced to is the Near wallet, we had to come up with a way to sign up the user on the wallet and in our backend.

On the frontend we had to deal with bugs while building with Next.js as we were using the latest version of Next.js and needed to understand how to build seamlessly with it.

📌 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We hacked this together in less than 3 days!!. 🚀🚀

📚 What we learned

  • We learned about the NEAR protocol, how to build smart contracts using Rust, and on how o integrate the Web3 part of the user flow using the NEAR Wallet Selector project.
  • We planned and wrote a good revenue model for the platform.

🛠What's next for Store Hub

We're working endlessly to make sure that the features below are available to all users on our platform. We're committing and embarking on this journey to revolutionize the e-commerce space through:

  1. Single-Click Store Launch: Store Hub makes starting an online business as easy as clicking a button. You don't need to worry about website hosting, development, or e-commerce features - our platform handles it all. Our hosting package focuses on providing a robust e-commerce solution with site-building features, allowing you to focus on what matters most: your business.

  2. Store Co-Ownership: Collaborate with friends or business partners seamlessly with our co-ownership feature. Share responsibilities and roles, manage operations together, and enjoy the rewards of shared success.

  3. Exceptional Business Analytics and Insights: Gain valuable insights into your business operations with our advanced analytics. Track sales, monitor customer behavior, optimize your inventory, and more. Our comprehensive analytics provide you with the information you need to make data-driven decisions and enhance your business strategy.

  4. NEAR Blockchain Integration: We're proud to utilize the NEAR blockchain, which provides a secure and scalable foundation for your online store. With NEAR, you can rest assured that the integrity of your store is upheld, protecting both you and your customers.

  5. Guaranteed Uptime and Speed: We understand that uptime and website responsiveness are crucial for your online store. That's why we strive for 99.99% to 100% uptime, ensuring your store is always available for your customers. Our platform is designed to load quickly, preventing lost sales due to slow site speeds.

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