International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication ISSN: 2321-8169

Volume: 4 Issue: 5 48 - 51
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ShopZoo: A Grocery Shopping Mobile Application with

Smart Recommendation System

Rahul Lad Jayti Lal

Department of Information Technology Department of Information Technology
Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune Institute of Computer Technology
Pune, India Pune, India
ladrahu00@gmail.com jaytilal@gmail.com

Minal Laad Karan Thanvi

Department of Information Technology Department of Information Technology
Pune Institute of Computer Technology Pune Institute of Computer Technology
Pune, India Pune, India
minal.laad@gmail.com thanvikaran95@gmail.com

Abstract-The paper presents a system that enables consumers to order grocery online, view product and shop recommendations using an online
grocery shopping mobile application called ShopZoo. ShopZoo customer application enables users to purchase grocery, stationery & electronic
items online from local vendors. The proposed system constitutes a shopkeeper application that lets the shopkeeper have control over his
inventory and process orders. An admin application will let us add new shops and new products to a universal database. The customer can select
from a variety of products, based on an item-item collaborative recommendation system. A list of shops is displayed according to distance
nearest to customers current location and product availability. The idea is to help customers by recommending better options for similar
products with trust of buying from nearby shops. The shopkeeper application can be used by local vendors so it can increase their sales and help
them manage and expand their business online.
Keywords: Mobile application, Product recommendation, Recommendation System, Item-item collaboration, Cloud databases
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are less often used to provide recommendations due to

I. INTRODUCTION
Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce whereby
consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller over
the Internet without an intermediary service. If a customer
wants to buy any local, daily in-need product they don't have
any other choice except going out to the local shops. This
increases the crowd at the shops resulting in increased
customer waiting time. Also, none of the existing
applications provide a statistical analysis of the nutritive
content of packed food products. The proposed system helps
customers make informed choices according to their health
conditions and requirements.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
Local Banya is a Mumbais premier online convenience
store. They provides products ranging from everyday
essentials like salt, rice, flour, sugar, etc. to specialty
products like organic mangoes, paper spray, baby care,
international brands and more. These products are sold from
their own repository, not from a local vendor. They provide
free home delivery and easy payment options like Cash on
delivery, Credit / Debit card and Net banking.Mobile phones
constraints such as power, speed and processor limitations.
Very few mobile applications provide recommendations for
grocery products.
III. RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS OVERVIEW
Recommending products to customers helps them in
selecting quality products and increases the chances of
customer satisfaction. A bad purchase reflects badly on the
shopkeeper and the mobile application as well. A
recommendation engine works in the background by
analyzing the previously purchased products from orders
placed by the customers. Not many mobile applications
provide recommendations as it brings along certain
challenges. The existing recommendation systems work on
either of the following:
A. Product Ratings
Product ratings as either represented in the form of five stars
or an integer in the range of one to five. It gives a general
idea about the quality of the product. It does not provide an
accurate reason of why the ratings as poor or excellent.

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International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication
Volume: 4 Issue: 5
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B. Product Reviews
Product reviews are substantially more descriptive and give
other customers a detailed explanation of the product quality.
It is however unlikely for all customers to write reviews
every time.
A combination of customer reviews and ratings along with
the frequency of sale can be used to provide better
recommendation and enhance the chances of those products
getting purchased.
The types of recommendation systems are:
A. Content based recommendation
In a content-based recommendation system, keywords are
used to describe all the items and a user profile is built to
identify the type of item a particular user likes. The
algorithm recommends items that are similar to those items
that a user liked in the past. In particular, various candidate
items are compared with items previously rated by the user
and the best-matching items are recommended.
B. Collaborative recommendation
Collaborative filtering is based on collecting and analyzing a
large amount of information on customers behaviors,
patterns or preferences and predicts what they might
purchase based on their similarity to other users. The main
advantage of the collaborative filtering approach is that it
does not rely on machine analyzable content and therefore it
is capable of accurately recommending complex items such
as grocery products without an understanding of what it
really is. Algorithms can be used for measuring user
similarity or item similarity in recommender systems
IV. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Fig 1: System Architecture
A. System Components
The system consists of three Android phones that contain
the Android applications and an Amazon EC2 Server that
contains the database and stores data such as the shopkeeper
and customer profiles, shop database and customer orders.
B. Requirements
Phonegap Framework is used to build the cross platform
web apps. Android studio is to convert them to proper
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Android compatible Android application. Amazon EC2
provides cloud services and provides cloud database storage.
Text editor (e.g. Brackets, gedit) is used for writing the code
and Node.js for server side programming. Angular.js along
with material UI principles is used to design and implement
a clean user interface.
V. METHODOLOGY
The collaborative system is used to construct the
recommendation system. This approach is based on the idea
that similar customers have similar needs and hence will
purchase similar products. People get the best
recommendations when they come from people who have
similar tastes and requirements. The three requirements of a
collaborative recommender system are:
i. Active participation from the customers in terms
that he places an order
ii. An easy way to represent the customers
preferences
iii. Algorithm to match the customers to similar
customers
A. Working of the system
The working of the system can be broken down to the
following two crucial steps:
i. Look for users who have placed similar orders
ii. Use the ratings of these users predict
recommendations for a similar user
B. Item-item collaborative approach
The item-item collaborative system eliminates the short
comings of the user-user collaborative approach. The
problems of user-user approach are:
a. Poor performance of system when number of
products is large but ratings are few
b. Costly computation of similarity in items
c. Computing of system every time the customer
profiles change
In order to overcome these problems, the item-item system
was proposed. It works as follows
It is a type of collaborative filtering based on the
similarity between productsthat is calculated using
customers ratings of those products.
The first step is to build a model by finding the
similarity between all pairs of item. The item pairs in
this case can be considered as previous orders placed
by the customers.
In order to build the model, the recommender system
needs a similarity function, s: II R, and a method
to generate predictions from ratings and similarities.
The similarity function can be based on cosine values
or correlation factors of ratings. The proposed system
uses the cosine similarity function.
The similarity score values can be used to generate
predictions using a weighted average.To generate
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International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication
Volume: 4 Issue: 5
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predictions or recommendations for a user u, Item-
Item collaboration first calculates s to compute a
neighborhood N U of neighbors of u. Then, the
system combines the ratings of users in N to generate
predictions for user us preference for an item i. This
is typically done by computing the weighted average
of the neighboring users ratings i using similarity as
the weights.
Recommendations are then generated by picking the
candidate items with the highest predictions.After
collecting a set S of items similar to i, , can be
predicted as follows
(, )( , , )
, = + ,
|(, )|
We use non-personalized baselines to compare
personalized algorithms and for pre-processing and
normalizing data for use with more sophisticated
algorithms.
The most primitive baseline is to predict the average
rating in the system: , = (where is the overall
average rating). This can be enhanced to some extent by
predicting the average rating by that user or for that item:
, = or , =
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B. Ease of updation
The database of the system gets updated continuously and
hence it is advisable to build a system that can handle
frequently updating of such a vast database. These updates
determine how the dataset of the customer changes.
C. Speed and scalability
It is essential to provide recommendations to new users fast
and immediately. The system should be scalable despite
there being a large dataset since online systems tend to have
millions of items in the database.
VII. PROTOTYPE
In order to determine if the proposed system works and is
effective, a prototype i.e. the ShopZoo mobile application
was built for customers. The app displays recommended
products on the home screen once the customer logs in. The
recommended products approach is a means of
customization.
VIII. CONCLUSION

Here , = + + The system is capable of recommending products based on

users and their rated items, also similar items are
recommended to them. The application was built and can be
are user and item baseline predictors, deployed to enhance businesses of local vendors. The local
respectively.Theycan be defined as follows, shopkeeper can also advertise their shop in order to reach
more customers. For the vendors who are already providing
1
= (, ) product delivery, can have a better fetch location facilities.
| |
At the same time along with the shopkeeper's
1
= ( , ) benefit, the customer's efforts in order to buy daily products
| |
will be reduced. The customers need not wait outside any
shop to buy the daily products. Delivery facility like cash on
delivery will help the customers get the desired daily
If an item or user is new, its baseline can be set to 0,
assuming that it is an average user or item product at their own place.

To compute similarity, the itemitem prediction

process requires an itemitem similarity matrix, say
S. This matrix is a standard sparse matrix, with
missing values set to 0 (no similarity). Cosine
similarity between item rating vectors is very popular,
as it is simple, fast, and produces good predictive
accuracy.
. Technology and Professor S.S. Shevtekar,Pune Institute of
s(i, j) =
| |2 | |2
VI. FACTORS DETERMINING USEFULNESS OF
THE RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM
The factors that determine the reliability and usefulness of
the system mainly depend upon the efficiency of the
algorithm applied for prediction. These factors are:
A. Quality of Predictions
This is the most essential factor as it is undeniable that
the recommendations of the system should be as accurate as
possible. The quality of predictions determines distinguishes
the system from a nave system based on average rating.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The work was supported by our guide Professor S.C.
Dharmadhikari, Pune Institute of Computer Technology. We
would like to thank her for her guidance and inputs.The work
is a result of their incessant motivation and help. We also
thankProfessor S.B. Deshmukh,Pune Institute of Computer
Computer Technology for their valuable feedback and
suggestions.
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International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication ISSN: 2321-8169
Volume: 4 Issue: 5 48 - 51
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