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What I built
I created a multi-static site manager for personal stores, managed through a chatbot. All the management of simple store such as create products, remove products and place orders it is done through message texts with a chatbot, it simplifies all the front end development and security because the bot is the only one who can access the API and as a developer, you just focus on the services.
As a customer you can create your own store with some products than you like to sell and all managed just by sending a Whatsapp text to the chatbot. No application installed just a text.
Inspiration
I decide to try this new approach because I think the chatbots have a lot of usages actually, in this case it can completely replace a complex UI and be as simple as an everyday action of sending messages. It simplifies the interaction with the machines and make more simple to use the new technologies for people that are not much into the tech.
What MIJO does
It can create a store site with a simple base Gatsby template and deploy a static site on the server, manage a list of products and handle the customer checkout sending a message to the owner telling him about the customer and his order.
Category Submission:
Exciting X-Factors is the main category of this project a good usage of the Twilio services to add a new way to manage an application with an AI assistant.
Demo Link
A sample of the app is deployed on development and very small server of my company, I am moving the app to a personal server with more reliable storage and getting the Whatsapp Bussiness account to go to production, right now as a demo I using this small server.
Main site:
[https://1.up-company.dev/]
If you want to try a demo join the Whatsapp sandbox let me a comment to give you the message to join my sandbox and give a try.
Showcase
Main page:
Create an store:
Add a product and update the site:
Generated site:
Place an order:
Link to Code
All the code is on [https://github.com/FabianBG/mijo-chatbot-store]
How I built it (what's the stack? did I run into issues or discover something new along the way?)
The main stack is NodeJS and Express for the compatibility with Gabsty which is the static site generator for the stores.
Over the Twilio integration, it was pretty simple all the info is in the documentation, right now the bot is very simple I want to improve it and add more languages support.
Next steps
I enjoyed the development and the idea is to keep working in this project adding more features and maybe more usages. Integrate a database to manage the store owner data and have more historic data to generate insights with it. Add more templates and improve the existing one.
Actually Twilio Autopilot juts support English which is a problem related to my location so I hope they add more support to other languages in the future.
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