Hi so this blogs about my product that I presented at the Hack2Hire Hackathon by Dell Technologies at Mahindra Ecole Centrale (now Mahindra University, Ecole Centrale School of Engineering) in 2019 August. It was a 24 hour long hackathon and was held at our campus itself with supervision and guidance from the Dell Technologies team. Our product was “ML/AI based solution that could increase Cart Conversion Rate” which landed my team the first position and an offer to intern at Dell Technologies for the next summer with a stipend of 25k per month.

Background

The topic - “ML/AI based solution that could increase Cart Conversion Rate” originated from a real life issue that Dell faced in their day to day E-commerce. The issue was that, several users visit the Dell website to purchase their products and browse through their technologies and services. Customers tend to shortlist and add products to their cart but most of the times do not end up purchasing the product. This could be due to a variety of reasons, better discounts, not a very friendly website (design and speed) hence trust issues etc. (These reasons were not shared with us). Hence based on statistics if even 1% of the crowd that added products to their cart could be somehow convinced to purchase that product, instead of letting it stay stale in the cart, it could lead to billions and trillions of profit to Dell. Hence for this topic with the use of AI/ML we had to somehow work on increasing the cart conversion rate. The catch attached this was that we in no way had to offer discounts or reduce costs of the product in anyway.

Logistics

The Dell Technologies team approached our campus a couple of weeks before the actual date of the Hackathon and delivered the topic and method of evaluation. There were about 7 products that were given as topics for the Hackthon each related to some core component of Computer Science (eg ML/AI,UI/UX,Full Stack etc).

We were to form teams of not more than 4 and select one topic for our participation. My team comprised of some of my closest friends Rochan,Raghav,Mak and me. Each of us had quite some strong skills that could contribute to the hackthon and hence decided to team up. Since most of us were slightly inclined to ML we played our strengths and chose the AI/ML based solution.

Our Solution

The first thing that came to our minds was that we needed to do some research on cart conversion. We read a whole lot of blogs and websites and collected data and prepared ourselves for this challenge. Based on the research we had shortlisted some core points as follows -