Marvas

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Inspiration

Second-hand trading platforms are trending these days: buyers can get what they want relatively cheaper, and sellers can get rid of what they no longer need (or handmade!). However, people are suspicious of buying/selling items from strangers due to the lack of an authoritative intermediary platform. So we thought it would be easier if both sides of the transaction came from the same school/company: buyers and sellers would trust each other more and pick-ups would be effortless. Not only that, but it's also a great place for colleagues/colleagues to bond, and a great way to reduce waste of resources.

What it does

On Marvas, in order to identify users, everyone is required to register with their school/company email address. Once registered, users can browse what they can buy on the home page, search for items they want, or post products they want to sell. To ensure the authenticity of the product information, we have also designed a seller rating system. Once going on the product details page, users can see more pictures of the product, its current condition, and the seller's credit rating. The user can communicate with the seller to make a purchase.

How we built it

Backend | Language | Python | | Web Framework | Django | | Database | CockroachDB | | Communication API | Twilio | | Cloud Server | Google Cloud | (In plan, but didn't use it due to time&budget constraint)

Frontend | Language | JavaScript | | Web Framework | React | | UI/UX Design | Ant Design | | Styling | Tailwind CSS | | API | fetch |

Challenges we ran into

Most of the tools, such as CockroachDB and Tailwind CSS, we used are fairly new to us, so we have to refer back to their documentation while going along, doing endless tiny adjustments to make the page look like what we desire. Sometimes we think of a new feature we need to implement, we would have to redo our front-end and back-end interface and database. We were not very familiarised with the testing process so it took a long time to check if our interface is working the way it was supposed to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of learning so many new technologies and publishing this fully functional website in under 24 hours! Successfully creating a full-stack project is the first time for some of our teammates.

What we learned

We learned how CockroachDB, Twilio, and Tailwind CSS work, to which we don’t have ANY prior knowledge. We learned how to write test cases. We familiarised ourselves with Ant Design, React, and Django, and we gained a deeper understanding of databases.

What's next for Marvas

We didn’t spend much time doing the UI/UX, right now a lot of assets are placeholders. so we plan to make it look nicer. We haven’t hosted our site yet, due to a lack of money and time. So we need to do that using AWS or Google Cloud later. And since Marvas is an online platform where people from the same institute gather to make transactions, we want to do promotion in our schools in order to have actual students join. Also, because Marvas stores people’s school/work emails and involves money transactions, security is of high importance. We will be strengthening protection on our site.

Built With

• cockroachdb
• django
• javascript
• python
• react
• tailwind
• twilio