Vitrine Popular: plataforma digital para descoberta de oportunidades de compra no comércio popular do centro de Picos-PI

Abstract

The popular retail sector in downtown Picos-PI, characterized by informal establishments locally known as "lojas do 20", is marked by opportunity-based purchasing and by the absence of digital mechanisms for price disclosure, forcing consumers to physically visit stores without prior information. In this scenario, this work aimed to develop Vitrine Popular, a digital platform designed to support the discovery and dissemination of purchase opportunities in this context, without intermediating commercial transactions. An applied, mixed-methods, exploratory-descriptive research was adopted, conducted as a case study and supported by bibliographic and field research, the latter comprising the mapping of twenty-two establishments and characterization interviews with nineteen consumers and ten merchants. The system was built incrementally, upon a decoupled architecture composed of a stateless REST API in Java with Spring Boot, a Progressive Web App (PWA) in React, and a PostgreSQL database, employing crowdsourced data production, suggestion moderation, and gamification mechanisms. Evaluation combined system testing and user acceptance testing: the platform achieved a mean score of 90.7 on the System Usability Scale, placing it in the "excellent" range, along with high acceptance, as 76.4% of participants reported noticing offers they were not looking for, confirming the support for opportunity-based discovery. It is concluded that the solution is viable and constitutes an evolvable foundation of regional relevance.