Metamarkt

Ever thought about which online marketplace is the most effective for buying and selling? We integrated all well known platforms into Metamarkt to save time, increase attention and sales.

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Inspiration

Online shop comparison portals can not only reduce your expenses, but also save you time because they can quickly display the availability and delivery time of the products you want. We have taken this principle and applied it to all types of marketplaces where the seller isn't necessarily a business.

What it does

Our website scans lots of marketplaces where housing, cars and other commodities are published according to the search query provided by the user. But search agents can also be configured for each specific marketplace: This eliminates the repetitive task that so many do on real estate sites like www.immowelt.de, www.immobilienscout24.de, www.wg-gesucht.de, www.wg-suche.de and www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de which saves you so much time! It also breaks up network effects that can lead to previously dissatisfied buyers finding an opportunity to trade a previously unfound item. In addition, the platform contributes to a sustainable economy by enabling more product cycles to be carried out more easily by different players.

How we built it

First, we set up a web server with Django. Second, our backend fetches and analyses other marketplaces using python requests and stores them in variables. The user then receives his requested result page with products from all different marketplaces. If he wishes, he will be notified when one of the marketplaces receives a new listing.

Challenges we ran into

Time was a bit tight for all the integrations and functionality we wanted.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy that we have accomplished so much in such a short time and even learned a few things along the way. The frontend layout is pretty advanced and a couple of tests worked out well. This is the cornerstone for a platform from which we and many others can benefit (eg. students, landlords).

What we learned

We learned how to use XPaths in Parsel and became familiar with the BeautifulSoup library in Python. This was the basis to get the website functionality up and running.

What's next for Metamarkt

There is a huge amount of online marketplaces with very different page structures. Each site requires additional integration time. But to expand the possible use cases, we need to do that. Developing an AI that does this for us would be the next logical step into the future. It would also be quite useful to be able to unify communication to the marketplaces regarding both text messages and new listings.

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