[Winners of Best Team Under 21] - Team 8 - TradeSure

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  Our frontend interface for users browsing products

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from both being consumers in the Irish market, and witnessing the want from consumers to be more sustainable. But, also a recent scam a member of our team faced when they tried to sell their MacBook and the person paid using a stolen credit card. This meant he lost his laptop outright. So, we wanted to create a solution that enables Irish consumers to be more sustainable and more resourcesful.

What it does

We wanted to build on the success of marketplaces like Ebay, DoneDeal, etc. These platforms offer of course in-person meetups for products. But, quite frequently a lot of people are scared of these meetups due to:

• Potential of being scammed (using fake PayPal emails, etc) -> This heavily applies to the older generations who are less technically inclined and can't spot spam emails
• Potential of being robbed
• Potential of time being wasted (people bringing less money than they said, etc) and finally, the ease of being able to sell it to a corporation for less money, but not have to stress about the potential of a confrontation.

We built this app to allow consumers to more effectively bargin (using AI insights into the real market price of items), meetup (using AI and user location APIs to pair user locations together) and using Stripe as an Escrow for transactions where we only unlock payments when a user scans the QR code of the buyer on their own device in person.

How we built it

We began with an idea on a whiteboard. We built our a list of API endpoints, planned our strategic array of tech stack based on our teams strengths. We went with a Tailwind/React Native implementation for frontend to support our QR code infrastructure. This was built in Expo so can be viewed on the web, alongside cross platform apps. We used Firebase for auth, FireStore for storage and OpenAI was our primary third party accessed for API queries. We used Flask framework because it's a lightweight framework and would allow us to validate our idea fast before committing to it.

We decided to implement third party AI such as OpenAI as it would benefit both the seller and the buyer together. The seller, for example would benefit from AI insights into the place to meet up. The consumer would benefit from the average market price for this item. We used OpenAI Vision to scan images of uploaded items to gauge wear and tear, and used this as a factor alongside the user description to estimate a fair market price.

Challenges we ran into

Using React Native for the first time was hard, keeping focused on certain features rather than trying to build everything. We expanded our scope a bit too far initially, wanting to be an all-encompassing marketplace. But, we felt focusing more on adding Stripe's Radar Fraud features and our own security suite would present a more polished and competitive product for the market, also making it easy to plug-in for big existing marketplaces.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using all dynamic data on a database, and Firebase for authentication, etc. We were able to utilize GPT efficiently and had a team member focused on prompt engineering to secure the best results from these queries. We are really proud of the design and user experience, where the QR code and payments all feel part of a user journey when using the app. From negotiation, to final confirmation.

What we learned

React Native, mobile app design, building, Stripe APIs, REST APIs, integrating OpenAI and prompt engineering.

What's next for HackIreland (2025) - Team 8 - TradeSure

Hopefully showing this cool project to more cool people!

Built With

• caprover
• ci/cd
• css
• docker
• expo.io
• flask
• github
• native
• react
• tailwind