Valu

Inspiration

Over the past few years, economic downturn due to the pandemic has led small businesses everywhere to struggle to stay afloat. The issue these small businesses face is being able to not only obtain but also maintain their customers while only having a limited amount of experience.

Loyalty programs are a great way of encouraging customer growth and retention because they incentivize customer spending and give people a reason to come back to a business.

What it does

Valu is an information system that automates the process of creating loyalty programs for small businesses. It utilizes a point system in which companies can set the the tiers at which points could be redeemed for rewards.

Valu is comprised of both a business facing side and a customer facing side. From the customer side, people can have access to all their rewards from participating businesses in one convenient location. They would also be able to view their eligible rewards and add any points to their account from their recent purchases. From the business standpoint, companies would be able to set thresholds for redeeming points as well as track customer data.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we faced were actually implementing the APIs we were provided with. The documentation of the NCR APIs was challenging to get a grasp on and making calls to the APIs proved a rather challenging feat. However, given more time, the APIs that would have been utilized were the NCR Catalog and CDM APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Logically working through everything and making sure that everything was sound from a design standpoint. In addition, having a user interface that people could interact with and the potential to upscale this idea and help out small businesses in the future is a big accomplishment. As we are all beginner hackers, our expectation going into this hackathon was to only have a rough idea. However, we ended up having more than just an idea, but a functional skeleton of our idea.

What we learned

We learned that calling APIs takes a lot more skill than one might think. In addition, we thought that it was important to efficiently delegate tasks so that we were all working towards the same end goal. Communication in hackathons is key to make sure everyone is on the same track and can work together to accomplish their goals. Additionally, not being afraid to ask for help, especially as a beginner hacker, was super important. We all had to be aware of our own strengths and weaknesses and understand the limitations and our capabilities given 36 hours.

What's next for Valu

In future iterations, we would want to add more functionality. For example, business analysis would help in evaluating the viability of our solution to the problem of struggling small businesses. In addition, we would like to expand the social aspect of Valu to beyond just the customers. We want Valu to be a place where small businesses can come together and support each other, rather than just customers supporting businesses.

Built With

• css
• figma
• html
• javascript