Columbia Book Exchange

The home page for the site, showing all the books available to purchase
Clicking on a listing will show more information on that book, including title, course, price, and seller information
Message the the seller with any questions or make a purchase request instantly
Messages to the seller are delivered straight to their email inbox
Confirmation of your request to the seller!
Students interested in selling can do so by creating a new listing
A sign-in page for users so they can partake in transactions
New users are welcome to make an account and get started with the site

Inspiration

The start of the semester can be more than chaotic when it comes to shopping for classes and choosing your schedules. In particular, the experience of buying books, especially for Core classes, can feel overwhelming and costly. While some students have access to used books from older students, the majority of students resort to buying or renting required texts at full price—paying hundreds of dollars for books they only read once. To explore the ways in which Columbia students can access school books in a more affordable, sustainable, and community-centered way, we developed Columbia Book Exchange.

What it does

Columbia Book Exchange provides an online marketplace for students to buy and sell used books. The sellers are able to upload books by specifying the title, author, price, and class(es) they are used for, which the buyers can use to search for the book they are looking for. Interested buyers can message the owners to ask questions and make a purchase directly on the website. Once sold, the site notifies the sellers by email.

How we built it

We first prototyped our website by designing on Figma. Since we all had some experience with front-end development and Javascript, we then decided to use React to build our front-end user interface due to its flexibility, easy styling, and component-based nature. Specifically, we used Chakra UI’s library to build our overlay components.

Challenges we ran into

Since most of our experiences are front-end related, one challenge was constructing the other parts of our site like the backend and database. Ideally, we would have wanted to develop a more self-sufficient backend and database for tracking and retrieving book listings and users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For all four members of our team, DivHacks 2023 is our first hackathon experience, so the entire weekend’s activities have overall been rewarding. Additionally, we had an effective workflow system utilizing GitHub, so we could all work on different parts of the project simultaneously; this was also something we did for the first time so it was incredible to collaborate in this way. Last, we are proud of our design and formatting, particularly our color scheme and layout of book listings.

What we learned

We learned how effective it was to design our site before getting started with the coding aspect as it ensured we were all on the same page with the vision of our website. Also, working in a team setting taught us the importance of constant communication and collaboration as this allowed for a smoother development process and a site we can be proud of.

What's next for Columbia Book Exchange

We would like to build a more efficient database to store the book data and users which would allow us to scale the app more easily. We also did not have time to implement the “lending” books function, so we’d like to implement that. Finally, we will market our product to the greater Columbia community to hopefully get buyers and sellers to start using the website, which will benefit the environment by saving books and saving students money.