Introduction
MERIM.BG is a mobile application and data platform designed to address the economic anxieties of Bulgarian consumers amidst rising inflation and the country's anticipated entry into the Eurozone. By leveraging crowdsourced data, the platform provides real-time price transparency, functioning as a tool for social good while also generating valuable market intelligence. This post explains the project's rationale. Use of consumer intelligence, and the mobile development aspects of the platform.
The Socio-Economic Context and Problem Statement
Bulgaria is currently facing a period of significant economic uncertainty. Inflationary pressures and the upcoming transition to the Euro have led to widespread consumer concern about price speculation and a lack of transparency in the retail sector. This information asymmetry empowers retailers at the expense of consumers, creating a need for a decentralized, consumer-driven solution to monitor and compare prices. MERIM.BG was conceived to address this gap, providing a tool for consumers to collaboratively track and understand pricing dynamics.
Harnessing Crowdsourced Consumer Intelligence for Social Good
At its core, MERIM.BG is an exercise in applied crowdsourced consumer intelligence. The platform's effectiveness is directly proportional to the participation of its users. By scanning barcodes and receipts, consumers contribute to a growing database of product prices across various retailers. This data, when aggregated and analyzed, offers several benefits for social good:
- Consumer Empowerment: The primary social contribution of MERIM.BG is the empowerment of consumers. By providing access to comparative pricing data, the application enables individuals to make more informed purchasing decisions, mitigating the effects of price hikes and speculative pricing.
- Economic Transparency: The platform fosters a more transparent retail environment. The open availability of pricing data can act as a deterrent to unfair pricing strategies and can help to stabilize markets during periods of economic transition.
- Data for Research: The anonymized data collected by MERIM.BG can serve as a valuable resource for economists, researchers, and policymakers studying consumer behavior, inflation, and market dynamics in Bulgaria.
Mobile Development and Technological Implementation
The development of MERIM.BG presented several interesting challenges and opportunities in the mobile application space. The project is not merely a data-entry application but a comprehensive platform for data acquisition, processing, and visualization. Key aspects of the mobile development include:
- Data Acquisition: The mobile application is the primary point of data entry. The development focus was on creating a seamless and intuitive user experience for scanning barcodes and receipts. This involved integrating robust optical character recognition (OCR) and barcode scanning libraries to ensure high accuracy in data capture from a variety of sources and formats.
- Data Processing and Normalization: A significant challenge lies in the backend processing of the crowdsourced data. The system must be able to normalize product names, sizes, and units from unstructured receipt data to allow for accurate price comparisons. This is achieved through a combination of algorithmic data cleaning and machine learning models that improve over time as the dataset grows.
- Real-time Data Visualization: For the application to be a useful tool for consumers, the processed data must be presented in a clear and timely manner. The mobile app features a user-friendly interface for searching products and comparing prices, with visualizations that highlight price differences and trends.
- Scalability: The platform is built with scalability in mind. The backend infrastructure is designed to handle a large volume of incoming data from users and to process it with minimal latency. This ensures that the application remains responsive and reliable as the user base grows.
Conclusion
MERIM.BG is more than just a price comparison app; it is a social tool that leverages mobile technology and crowdsourcing to address a pressing economic issue. By empowering consumers with information, the platform aims to foster a more transparent and equitable retail market in Bulgaria. The project also serves as a case study in the application of mobile development and data science to create solutions that have a tangible and positive social impact.