CommunityShop: a web application for a social shopping experience

Online shopping is the shortest distance between two states: full wallet to an empty wallet. The advent of online shopping and the joy of getting things you want at your doorstep with just few clicks has been popular among most people. The experience that it provides is widely welcomed by many shoppers, especially those who do not enjoy the real-life shopping experience. However, everything has its own disadvantages and so does online shopping; which is paying an additional charge for an item to be delivered. This is the problem that is addressed in this project and the aim is to solve or mitigate the problem. The problem is paying additional money for shipping and the project aims to solve it by developing an application to help interested people meet, shop, and share or avoid the shipping costs overall. This project is a web application with a real-time chat feature and a simple, easy to use interface. The application is developed with a sole purpose of helping people meet and shop together to save shipping costs. The application is developed using the Model View Controller architecture (MVC). MVC architecture has different modules: model which handles the core functionality and data manipulation, view is what the user sees and enters required information as input, controller is what takes the information from users and sends it to the model for data manipulation. The real-time chat application is developed using WebSockets; an application protocol. It uses a full duplex communication over a single TCP connection and enables large streams of message to be transferred between two peers. Websockets was implemented using advanced Java API. This application interface was developed using interaction design concept to make it simple to use. Initial research was conducted on a small group of participants, followed by developing personas, scenarios, and mockups which are powerful tools for developing an interface. Overall, CommunityShop is an attempt to develop an application with the latest technologies that can prove to be useful to users at organizations with scope for improvement at various levels.