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Homepage of FlipASAP
Inspiration
The fast-fashion industry is one of the most pollutant industries in the world. According to the research, an average household does not use around 30% of the wardrobe, which otherwise could be worn by other people. Donating these clothes to charities is always an option, but often people do not want to give them away for free. Selling those items is very time-consuming due to numerous online marketplaces.
We help people to sell easier and faster by pushing their items to several marketplaces in a single click. Thereby making the process more efficient, effortless and increasing the likelihood of the item being sold.
What it does
How we built it
We analysed the item uploading process across several marketplaces (Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree, Preloved, eBay and craigslist) and analysed how we could push products there. For our MVP we built a custom form that contains the most essential details about the item (title, price, description, gender and images) and then wrote scripts using Selenium (Python) and Nightmare.js (Javascript) that automatically push products from the form to the marketplaces.
Challenges we ran into
None of the platforms we looked at had an open API that we could access. So we had to use other tools to allow us to achieve our goal. The most challenging was Gumtree, which to our surprise a very sophisticated security system that prevents the automatic listing by bots.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We actually managed to build it and make it work! Facebook marketplace uses React, which made it very hard to manipulate using standard tools, so we designed a custom script that does the job well. We have built integrations with Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist that pass all verifications and distribute products to these platforms with a single click.
What we learned
Neither of us has worked with Selenium or NightmareJS before, so it was an exciting and interesting learning experience. We also tried many things to go around Gumtree's security system and learned a whole lot about web-security in the process
What's next for FlipASAP
To make it useable by other people we need to introduce the authentification system and increase security that would allow people to register on our platform and safely store their login credentials on our platform. After that, we could either work on integrations with other marketplaces (Preloved, eBay and try again Gumtree) or think about expanding the product range to allow listing of items from other categories. As an option, we could also adopt this system to be used by the business to sell to the customers.
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