Swappr

Our website

Inspiration

No one likes to waste money. Online shopping has revolutionized how people engage in markets. Any time we shop, we're consciously aware that there may be a better deal of a given product online. Our goal with Swappr was to let people have access to all this information at their fingertips.

What it does

Swappr takes a photo of the front or back of a product and lets you compare the price with retailers online.

How we built it

Our website is built with react.js and hosted via Netlify. We first upload the image of the product to Firebase so we can access it remotely. We then used Google Cloud Vision API to extract either the UPC from the back of the product or the product name from the front. In the case it's a UPC, we used the get-upc API to find the product name and description from their database. Then, we make calls to the Amazon Product Advertising and the Google Shopping APIs to get related products, their prices and links to where you can buy them.

Challenges we ran into

We had trouble making the calls to some APIs. For instance, some APIs were outdated and had poor documentation. Additionally, we aren't that experienced with React and it was difficult to compile everything into one working website.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of getting everything working in one neatly packaged application. We hope Swappr can help shoppers make the best decisions possible. We're also proud of the use of AI to make the product conveniently accessible via images.

What we learned

We both feel like we have a better understanding of how frontend web development, HTTP requests and API calls work. In the future, we're confident that we'd be able to apply this knowledge to make applications faster.

What's next for Swappr

In the future, we want to add more marketplaces so users can get find the best comparisons as conveniently as possible. Additionally, we hope to make the website into an app for ease of use on the go.