SHOPPING MADE SAFER AND EASIER

There were many phenomena that accompanied this event and one of the major ones was panic-buying of essential items throughout the world, especially in the initial days of the pandemic which disrupted supply chains of goods and services. This disruption led to unequal access to these items leaving families, high-risk groups and individuals without access to the most basic needs. This was mostly seen at grocery stores, supermarkets and pharmacies. People had to make trips to multiple shops and stores to check for the availability of goods and services and this exacerbated the risk of getting infected by the virus.

Even when the supply chains eased down a little bit, the stores and supermarkets were still the hotspots for getting caught by the virus. The government imposed social distancing norms but what could people do when the they had no idea about the crowd or where they could find a particular item. This is the problem that we are trying to solve.

We are building a platform that supports the users in their trips to the supermarket by optimising their visit. This is done in the following ways:

• Checking the availability of a particular product at a shop
• Informing them of the minimum number of people at the shop at a particular time
• Letting them book their visit slot for faster service and efficient pickups

With this application, we aim to eliminate the unnecessary movement of people to high risk areas with multiple strangers like stores and supermarkets by providing them with the ability to find what they need quickly, efficiently and smartly. This will lead to better practice of the social distancing norms in high risk areas.

Note: The individual frontend and backend documentation can be found inside the respective directories.

Our application has two stakeholders - the store owners and consumers. The application first requires that the store owners download this application. This will be beneficial to them in multiple ways. The shopkeepers can:

• Manage inventory of their store with this app and alerts will be generated when they are reaching the minimum threshold of a product
• Estimate the number of customers that will be coming to their shop during a particular time period
• Prepare orders in advance in case a consumer has also placed their order
• Follow the trends of what users are looking for the most and make it available to them

We have discussed the benefits for the consumers in the previous segment.

1. The store owner will log on to the website and create their own store where they can add image, location and the inventory.
2. Users can log in and create their profile after which they can search for stores around them or products. They can check the availability of the product, the number of people scheduled to be in the store at a particular time and book their visit to the store. They can also specify their shopping list and request the store to collect the items before hand.
3. As more users log on, the people counter will become more accurate.
4. The store owners can look at the expected customers and their shopping list well in advance and get any items or save them if they are running low.
5. This can be done through the analytics support of the application for the store owner.
6. The consumer visits the store and picks up their desired goods and leaves much faster leading to better practicing of the social distancing norms and less exposure to the virus.

• Front-End: ReactJS, HTML, CSS

• Back-end: Django

• Version Control: Git and GitHub

• Task Management: Trello, Notion

• Standup Meetings: Google Meet

Detailed Report

Presentation

• Take a look at the Existing Issues or create your own Issues!
• Wait for the Issue to be assigned to you after which you can start working on it.
• Fork the Repo and create a Branch for any Issue that you are working upon.
• Create a Pull Request which will be promptly reviewed and suggestions would be added to improve it.
• Add Screenshots to help us know what this Script is all about.

Prakhar Bhasin

Kirtik Singh

Prakhar Rathi