BuyBot

Inspiration

I had the inspiration to build BuyBot when I realized how much time is wasted on filling out repetitive information when shopping online. I knew that there had to be a simpler way to optimize people's time and not keep doing the same things repeatedly. Another aspect that I looked at was that items I wanted to buy during sales always went out of stock immediately, and I could not even get close to buying them as I was stuck putting in simple details like my name and address. These two problems led me to build BuyBot, and now I have an efficient solution.

What it does

BuyBot is an automatic shopping bot that can be used to easily shop online. Whenever checking out, all a customer needs to do is paste in their amazon link and the bot will do the rest. This means that there is no need for the customer to type in their repetitive information (username, password, name, email address, address, city, state, zip code). At this stage, the only part the customer needs to fill out is the payment section. Although this follows the same procedure to code, I left it out as payment could not be done in the demo. Not only does BuyBot help you in daily occurences, it can also help when trying to buy popular products. Many products start to run out of stock very quickly, and people miss the opportunity to get what they wanted. With BuyBot, they eliminate the need to slowly type in all their information, and instead the process is quick and simple. Overall, BuyBot is a helpful bot that people can use on a daily basis whenever shopping online!

How we built it

I spent a good amount of time learning more about python and selenium so that I could utilize them to make BuyBot. Once I got a base understanding, I went in and kept working through challenges to better the final product. I utilized PyCharm as my IDE, and also used selenium for automation.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge I ran into was trying to figure out why my state selector in checkout was not clicking on Virginia. After some debugging, I realized that I needed to automate two separate button clicks so that the bot could find Virginia in the list and then select it.

Another challenge I ran into was that I could not get past the add to cart section. Even after multiple tries to change the code, I could not find a solution. After testing many different fixes, I finally came up with the idea of changing the xpath from full xpath to regular xpath, and was able to allow the bot to get past.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud that as a relatively new coder, I was able to create an effective bot that simplifies daily shopping. I learned many aspects of coding in just a day, and with this progress, I am inspired to keep working on my skills as a programmer.

What we learned

I learned a lot about python and selenium through project-based learning, and think it benefited me a lot. Although I did not know much about both these subjects, by immersing myself in different videos and articles explaining the fundamentals and key concepts, I was able to result in coding a really interesting bot.

What's next for BuyBot

As I work on BuyBot, I hope to expand to other websites outside of Amazon. For example, during the coding of BuyBot, I tested out BestBuy's website and noticed that the same procedure could be applied with some changing of code. I think that getting more websites underneath the bot could make a huge potential impact on the finance community and how people shop online. I also hope to get a website up where there is a network that allows me to store card numbers securely so that it is safe for consumers. This is one thing that I could not do in my demo as I could not actually pay for the product.

Built With

• python
• selenium