Markup Destroyer

If you've ever tried to buy a new car recently, you've probably heard of dealer markups. In short, they suck, and this web app will help you avoid them through the power of crowdsourced databases.

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Video Timestamps (I'm so tired in this video): 0:27 → Answer #1, 1:20 → Demo, 3:07 → Answer #3, 3:53 → Answer #4, 4:29 → Answer #5

Inspiration

I hate car dealerships. Absolutely hate them. And they've only gotten worse lately with their dealer markups. I don't want to pay $96,000 for a Toyota RAV4 Prime (MSRP is $40k), and I'd like for others to avoid that too. That's why I made this thing.

What it does

Markup Destroyer is a (aptly named) web app that takes (scrapes) a crowdsourced database called markups.org and puts together easy to read analytics so that anybody can see them.

Notable things you can look at are the top 10 worst car dealerships (in terms of markups) in the United States, and by state as well.

You can also look at average markups for all the years, makes and models of cars in the markups.org database.

How I built it

I used Python for the backend and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the frontend. I used Flask to tie everything together. It's certainly not an atypical structure.

The webscraper is pretty cool in my opinion. I didn't do anything special (it's just a Python webscraper)- I just think webscrapers are cool.

Challenges I ran into

Let me be frank- I absolutely suck at front end development, since I barely have experience with it. I had never heard of Flask before starting on this... I mean, this is my second web application. Google was definitely my best friend here (like it always is, thanks bud), and I would've been completely stuck if I didn't have it. At one point, I didn't know how to load json locally with JavaScript. I grabbed something from Google, put it in, realized that it didn't work, racked my brain for 30 minutes, and realized that a debugger exists in Chrome. What I grabbed ended up being an asynchronous thing, so it was calling waaaay later than I thought it would. To work around that, I made a bunch of my other functions async. Without Google, I don't think I would've even been able to start.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Actually making something presentable. I'm genuinely shocked (in a good way).

What I learned

Everything here was pretty much new to me. I can now somewhat confidently say that I can do webdev with Flask and Python.

What's next for Markup Destroyer

I'm going to add some features that I didn't get to adding (not enough time!!!), like logging in and adding listings in the database yourself.

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