For the past few months, I have been working on a new DApp called "BeeCheap". Its purpose is to collect deals and coupons from all over the web and gather them in one single place on the Hive blockchain.
Users can post deals on BeeCheap and receive a curation reward. Good deals with a high number of upvotes rise in the list.
I hope the DApp can bridge the gap to Web2 and bring in some new Hiveans. As far as I know, there is no Web2 site that currently pays its users for submitting deals.
My biggest concern is that those deals will be seen as spam and get downvoted. I'll create a new BeeCheap community explicitly for voting on deals to keep it as separate as possible from the regular posts on the Hive blockchain.
But now to the technical details:
A deal is a regular post in the BeeCheap Community. It has an additional json-metadata appendix which contains details like country, currency, price, shop name, as well as start and end dates. Only posts containing that metadata are shown on BeeCheap in order to maintain a uniform structure.
A deal post can be formatted via markdown. For simplicity, there are also buttons for basic formatting and the option to link or upload images.
Users post new deals using the Hive Keychain. For now, I intend to keep a 10% beneficiary to further finance the development of the DApp and give quality posts a curation boost.
The frontend is written in Vite (TypeScript) and reads posts directly from the blockchain via dhive. To speed up loading times, a PHP script saves the top-voted deals in a SQLite database.
The DApp is designed with privacy in mind and only saves data like the username in local storage.
To keep things simple, I have created a test community for publishing test deals while BeeCheap is still in development. A testnet or Tintoy would probably have been overkill.
Where is the project right now?
The basic functionality (posting deals, commenting, and voting) is already working. Users can use filters to select their country, currency, category, min/max price, and search for specific items.
Right now, BeeCheap isn't live yet, but I intend to publish it within the coming weeks.
The roadmap
Right now, there is no onboarding yet for new users who don't have a Hive account. At the beginning, I will probably send them to Ecency to create a new account. In the future, I'd like to make onboarding as smooth as possible.
While the UI is designed to work on mobile devices, aside from the Hive Keychain, there is no mobile-friendly way to log in yet.
Feedback
Do you think the direct access to the blockchain via dhive will scale when there are more posts in the community?
Would you prefer the list of deals to be concise or have a litte more details about the offer?
The "only BeeCheap" button filters for deals posted on BeeCheap or also inside the community. (the latter means the post comes with less details about the deal (currencies, country, start date end date). Should I keep it or only display deals submitted via BeeCheap?
What do you think about the background. Do we need more contrast?
Currently there are the following deal categories:
Electronics, Home, Kids & Family, Finance & Insurance, Culture & Events, Garden, Jewelry, Fashion, Groceries, Health, Toys, Sports, Travel, Gaming, Crypto and Automotive.
Have I forgotten anything important?
This is my first app on Hive, I am very excited how it will perform and if I got everything correct.