Torobche: An Extension for When You're Buying More Than One Thing
A Small Problem That Always Bugged Me
Every time I wanted to buy several products from Torob at once, the same annoying routine would start. Say I wanted a phone, but I also needed a case, a screen protector, and a charger to go with it. Naturally, I didn’t want to order each one from a different store and pay four separate shipping fees.
The problem was that Torob shows you the list of stores carrying each individual product, but there’s no way to see which store has all four items at once. I’d end up with a bunch of open tabs, manually cross-referencing store names one by one. It was slow, and it was easy to make mistakes.
After going through this same routine a few too many times, I realized this was exactly the kind of problem a simple extension could solve. That’s how Torobche came about; you can find more details on its landing page as well.
How Torobche Works
The core idea behind Torobche is simple: while you’re on a Torob product page, a button appears letting you add that product straight to your Torobche cart. You repeat this for every item you want to buy together.
Torobche then pulls the list of stores for each of those products and runs an intersection algorithm to figure out which stores carry all of them at the same time. It shows you the result along with the total price, so you can easily decide where to buy from.
One thing I ran into along the way was the need for product grouping. For example, when you’re torn between two phone models and want both to be considered in the calculation without checking them separately. So I added a feature to create groups of alternative products, and Torobche figures out the best combination on its own.
Things I Thought About While Building It
One thing that mattered a lot to me was separating online stores from local, walk-in stores. A lot of the time, people are looking for a store in their own city where they can go in person, not necessarily order online. So I built that separation in, along with city filtering.
I also added a few filters that already exist on Torob itself, but having them inside Torobche keeps the whole process in one place: Torob Guarantee, installment payment options, and a filter for stores rated above 4.5.
Another feature I ended up needing myself was cart sharing. Sometimes I wanted to send a list I’d put together to a friend, either so they could buy the same things or just give me their opinion. For this, I built a compact link system that stores the entire cart inside the link itself, with no server required. You just send the link, and the other person sees the same cart with one click.
Technical Challenges
The interesting part of building this was implementing the store intersection algorithm. Since each product can have many store listings, you have to match them up correctly and group them by things like city and store type, which turned out to be a bit trickier than I expected going in.
Another concern was how much load the extension put on Torob’s pages. Since it needs to read content from product pages, I had to be careful to keep it lightweight and avoid disrupting the browsing experience on the site itself.
Where It Stands Now
Torobche is live on the Chrome Web Store, and anyone can install it and give it a try. If you’re like me and often buy several products together, and you’re tired of hopping between stores to figure out where to order from, this might be useful for you.