Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Fall 2019
Same-day delivery plug-in for e-commerce sites
SCS Honours Project Image
ABSTRACT
In today’s fast-moving consumer market, there is a growing need for retailers to provide same-day delivery services. In Canada, SaaS (service as a software) solutions emerging that provide task services that can be used in numerous ways. They leverage independent workers to perform small tasks such as picking up and dropping off packages, driving passengers to their destinations, or performing a small household task for a customer. While these SaaS solutions are powerful in terms of the vast array of functionalities, they provide to manage the logistics, there is a gap between these solutions and online stores. Retailers have to build an additional connector for their websites and manage the data flow from their customers to these platforms, which becomes a heavy investment for the smaller players. This project covers the build of a plugin, an intermediary web-service that can connect e-commerce sites, such as Shopify, to one of the SaaS solutions. Some retailers have slightly different requirements, so the plugin would offer standard features that can be used across the e-commerce sites with an added option of customizability. However, since the customization is done case-by-case, which would require the participation of a retail company, the project only offers the standard features and this text discusses how those features may be used. At the time this document is produced, the plugin only offers APIs that can easily be integrated with an existing web form on a retail site. In the future, the plugin will also offer form generation via GUI (Graphical User Interface) that can be customized and embedded into the websites to mask away any and all complexities an API can present.