Big Bargains

Millions of people join communities that broadcast clearance sales. Having a central website that shows all the clearance items from the different websites is something that would save time for many.

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Inspiration

I personally exclusively use Reddit for the subreddit r/frugalmalefashion. One day, I realized I missed out on a set of deals, and noticed that the pain point was that it wasn't that fluid to click into the link associated with every individual post, and have to scan for what the deal was. I then decided that I wanted to aggregate these deals and put it in a central place.

$1.7 trillion was spent on clothing in 2022, and this amount is expected to increase to $2.2 trillion by 2027. Consumers have a large interest in spending money on clothing, and seeking to get better deals is very natural. Prime Day and Black Friday are both highly celebrated days where there are a large number of sales.

What it does

Aggregates clearance offers from different clothing sites, stores it in a data store, and then serves these items in a unified, central website. Exposes users to more clearance and savings.

How we built it

I used:

  • Reddit API to query a subreddit that has a list of links corresponding to website pages with clearances.
  • Octoparse for a quick way to scrape.
  • MongoDB as a source of truth.
  • React as the web framework.

Challenges we ran into

Every website is structured differently, so it is very difficult or impossible to automate the process of fetching items. For each website, I had to generate a new workflow to scrape the items.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud of getting this in a working state and a vision for how to make it extensible to more products.

What we learned

It was my first time using both the Reddit API, Octoparse, and MongoDB.

What's next for Big Bargains

Converting it into a email newsletter, to generate more traffic and onboard more users.

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