CorSell: Big Red Store

Any person any product. CorSell is a dedicated marketplace for buying and selling of second hand goods and subletting

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Inspiration

We realized that there wasn't a conducive platform for Cornell students to buy and sell second hand goods and sublet houses over the summer and other breaks. Many rely on a Facebook buy and sell page, but are restricted by lack of functionality, efficiency, and an inability to have everything they may be looking for in one space. In the end many turn to buying new goods from the Cornell Store or Amazon Prime, and this tends to be an expensive venture.

What it does

We want to bring everything to one dedicated space, and we aim to use Corsell to do just that. slSellers can upload items they may want to sell, or houses they may want to lease. Buyers can search for the items they want, obtain a map of locations of houses they may want to sublet, and can use our chat feature to contact the seller for more details, making the entire process of obtaining their product more efficient.

How we built it

Most of the coding was done in HTML5, with Javascript incorporated. We worked with JSONs to create viable databases and together with Algolia's APIs, Twilio's chat API and HERE.com's map APIs, we were able to create a functional product with widgets that would enhance user experience.

Challenges we ran into

At first, the main challenge was that none of our team had significant impact working with HTML, or with integrating APIs into our code. We also struggled with creating a website that would DO something, and we spent a lot of time running through the functionality of our website.

What we learned

We learnt a lot over the past 36 hours. Firstly, many of us were coding in HTML for the very first time. This was a challenge at first, but rewarding when it came to looking at the overall user interface and experience. Furthermore, none of us actually had experience working with and integrating APIs into a software. This was also a great learning experience for our team.

What's next for CorSell: Big Red Store

The next big step is to scale this up, create a server that this can be hosted on, and work on integrating all the APIs and features of the website more smoothly. We think that if this could be made to work, it could help thousands of students at Cornell.

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