Akshay Krishnaiah seen here on stage with the team at Money2020
PayPal’s Research Labs team was named a winner at Money2020’s hackathon on Monday in Las Vegas. The 24-hour hackathon, which is considered to be the fintech world’s top hackathon, brought together ten corporate sponsors including PayPal, and 600 leading engineers and developers from some of the world’s most notable companies and accelerators, including Poynt, Dropbox and YCombinator. The event resulted in a total of 165 projects and leveraged technologies ranging from augmented reality to beacons.
Akshay Krishnaiah, PayPal Research Labs’ Entrepreneur In Residence who led PayPal’s winning team, explained the hackathon challenge they chose. “We decided to to build a VIP shopping experience by leveraging the power of connected devices and data visualization. To do so, we built the GoCart app.”
The four-person team took the concept of online and mobile conversion optimization and applied it to an in-store experience. “We call it aisle-conversion optimization,” Krishnaiah said.
The GoCart app gives in-store consumers three options:
1.Cart-free shopping. This enables shoppers to select the items they want via their mobile device without the need for a physical cart. Items automagically appear on a shopper’s mobile device based on which aisle they are in, enabling them to add the items to their mobile cart and edit the quantity. As the shopper adds items to their mobile cart, a sales associate gathers and bags the items. When done, shoppers can pay right on their phones without the need to stand in line. Receipts appear directly in the app and the bagged items are handed to the shopper as they exit the store.
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2. Line-free checkout. This experience is similar to the cart-free shopping experience, except that shoppers physically pick up the items from the shelves themselves and complete the payment on their mobile device. The app intelligently dispatches the nearest available store associate to the shopper for verification and quick checkout, so the shopper doesn’t have to wait in line.
3..Curbside checkout. This solution enables shoppers to buy online or on their mobile device and have their items ready for pickup without even having to get out of the car.
The PayPal team’s winning GoCart app was also selected as the audience favorite, and awarded a check of $5,000 from Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. A total of ten teams were awarded specific challenge prizes by various sponsors. All ten winners are invited to the upcoming Winner’s Meet.
When asked why he thought his team’s project won the favor of both the judges and the audience, Krishnaiah shared: “First, we prioritized empathy in the user experience. Before we built the app, we talked with customers and learned their shopping habits, patterns, likes and dislikes. We talked with parents participating in the hackathon who shopped with their kids and combined that information with shopping environment studies we conducted earlier. We built GoCart with all of this in mind. Second, we’ve seen a lot of companies working to solve the ‘last mile’ problem of payments in-store. We wanted to build a seamless commerce experience that solves for the entire everyday shopping journey, giving customers a compelling reason to adopt mobile payments.”
As a sponsor, PayPal, along with Braintree, had the largest number of integrations when compared to the rest of the nine corporate sponsors. Of the 165 teams, 40+ integrated Braintree’s v.zero or PayPal APIs. For its part, PayPal/Braintree named PayChat as the winner of its hackathon challenge. PayChat is an integrated in-context customer support solution that allows online shoppers to get direct support from online sales representatives right inside the browser. With a simple JavaScript integration, the merchant can offer their customers direct person to person sales support, push items to their basket, and provide a direct in-chat payment experience using the Braintree v.zero Drop-in experience.