Community Deals is an app for the everyday consumer. People who love to shop, people who want to shop, people who need to shop. This app aids users in their shopping experience as it:
- Provides users with a feed of discounts in stores within a chosen location.
- Allows users to communicate with friends/trusted peers to take advantage on deals that may otherwise only be available to one person.
- Other trusted users/friends can also buy something within the same order and pay the user back through the app. This allows them to save on shipping costs and other extraneous fees as well as take advantage of a certain personalized discount.
This application's purpose is to provide a easier shopping experience while also building a sense of community amongst locals by allowing them to post their own deals on the feed as well as other deals they think will be helpful for others. This will increase the total amount of money saved throughout the community and reduce the time required to find discounts. This also helps lower income communities who benefit greatly on discounted prices on everyday needs.
We were inspired to build this app by our personal experiences when online shopping. My friends and I would combine orders so that we could take advantage of each others' discounts. But there would always be the hassle of keeping track of what each person ordered and how much they had to pay to the person that placed the order. This app aims to reduce inefficiency and provide simplicity to this process as well as introduce features that we feel would improve the overall shopping experience for an average consumer.
To build this mobile application, we used Flutter with Dart and Firebase as our tech stack. We also implemented the use of the Capital One Nessie API, the Google Maps API, and Firebase API. When building this app, we faced a few challenges, mainly integrating different APIs within our app. We also faced difficulties learning to work with new technologies as well as new terminologies (some of us initially did not know what an API was).