ExpiAlert: A Real Time Product Expiry Alert Management System for Small Retail Businesses

Abstract Pharmacies, supermarkets and provision stores in Nigeria still track product expiry dates largely by hand, through periodic shelf checks and paper logs. Expired goods are therefore found late, often after they have been sold or after they have accumulated on shelves, which creates financial loss, regulatory exposure and risk to consumers. This paper presents ExpiAlert, a web based system that keeps a continuous account of every registered product, classifies each item as Fresh, Expiring Soon or Expired against a threshold chosen by the business, and delivers alerts through two complementary channels: a persistent Socket.io connection for users who have the dashboard open, and a scheduled daily email digest for users who do not. The system was built with React, Node.js, Express and MongoDB, follows a three tier architecture with token based authentication and per business data isolation, and was deployed on free cloud hosting so that a small business can use it without capital outlay. The work followed a design science approach, with requirements drawn from interviews at a community pharmacy and a provision store. Fifteen system test cases passed on the deployed instance, in app alerts arrived in about 500 ms after a triggering event, against a target of two seconds, and email digests arrived within two to three minutes in most runs. We discuss the design decisions behind these results, the limits of the evaluation, and the steps needed before wider field deployment. CCS Concepts Information systems → Web applications ; • Applied computing → Business process management ; • Software and its engineering → Designing software .