UMSL| Marketplace

Inspiration

The idea came to us after being presented with the problem of improving the sense of community of UMSL, as well as somehow imporving the existing UMSL Mobile app. We thought a good way to create a community within our campus was to establish a marketplace where students can buy and sell their stuff, as well as post announcements, create study groups, etc.

What it does

Allows students to buy and sell items such as books, electronics, etc. within the UMSL community in a safer fashion than sites such as cragslist or ebay by eliminating the stranger meeting factor

How we built it

Used an open source java script based e commerce hosting site as the framework, then customized to our needs to embed Google Maps, and some HTML.

Challenges we ran into

Small team, no experienced coders. We tried to build an android app from the ground up using android studio but realized that we lack the expertise, so we thought using an open source self hosting site would better allow us to present our idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working Marketplace that can be accessed through the existing UMSL Mobile app Developed a viable business model that could help the campus community, as well as make money Worked as a team in every step of the way, had good communication, learned together, and applied each others skills to form a product.

What we learned

Picked up an understanding of android developing how to actually use GitHub to clone, push, and pull repositoies The process of team dynamics The process of taking an idea, making a plan, and implementing steps in order to build a product Time management

What's next for Project148

We want to develop the app further to implement features that we would've liked to include in this project, such as connectivity, more functionality, etc. We want to develop it in an android platform and build on what we have in order to make this business idea into a reality that can be used by UMSL students.