SHOPLISTER: A List Management Tool For Grocery

Abstract

Shopping for groceries is a very essential part of human life activity performed regularly. It is a fundamental necessity that everyone needs to do to survive. However, it can be observed that people spend very little time to plan and manage their grocery, undervaluing its importance. People tend to find the process of shopping for grocery complex and frustrating, thus they do not pay much attention to it. This project is set to analyze the problems faced by people with creating and managing their grocery, whilst critically evaluating the current methodologies used identifying the likely gap in with the current approaches within the context of Sri Lanka. Poor decision making, lack of customer attention, inefficient budget management, poor health and lifestyle and difficulty in sharing responsibilities are the key problems that have been identified which is resulted by lack of effort and time spent by people in managing their grocery. These problems have been identified through a pilot study and initial background research conducted. This project aims to come up with a solution that will help improve the customers perspective of grocery list management and enhance their experience when doing so. Based on the problem identified and background research a proposed solution ‗ShopLister‘ is identified, designed and implemented in a prototype level. It consists of a mobile-based application which allows people to create grocery lists, manage (add/delete/cross items) lists, suggest items to added to list, view available brands for items, locate items within supermarkets, track monthly spending and get analysis based on their grocery lists. A web-based application is also provided to supermarkets who can directly influence a customer‘s grocery list by providing incentives and getting to know their spending patterns. This process is a complete business process re-engineering as supermarket are not able to directly impact a customer when making a grocery list with current solution available. It is strong evaluated that this type of solution will help improve people‘s lifestyle and reduce the level of complexity face in grocery list management.