Stinger Seller

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  The homepage

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  Searching for "pencil"

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  The profile page, showing an item to be delivered

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  Adding an item to the site

Inspiration

College students in our generation often come with unlimited wants and short-attention spans. As a result, on many social media platforms we often see students attempting to sell their used items or trying to buy new items for cheap, but failing to execute any transaction either due to a fear of their payment security or unable to find their desired item. And thus, Stinger Seller was born! We wanted to create a secure marketplace for all Georgia Tech students to not only live sustainably, but also promote increased accessibility of educational materials, especially given the rising costs of academic resources.

What it does

We unite and foster efficiency for constantly-busy college students, specifically Georgia Tech students, on a consolidated platform solely for buying and selling items. We're a one stop shop for all your wants and needs.

How we built it

We have a monolithic Flask application that uses an SQLite database to keep track of all listed items and all sellers. We use Stripe Connect to route payments between buyers and sellers in a secure manner. We have a search feature that implements sentiment searching using natural language processing methods alongside filtering and simple querying. We utilized Spacy to tokenize word data, doc2bow to vectorize each token, and gensim as our model to match similarities. We used tagging in parallel to our search feature, to allow the users to easily filter by specific categories in addition to their desired searches.

Challenges we ran into

We had limited experience and limited time. Additionally, querying was a challenge as we provided tag filters, a simple keyword search, and an advanced NLP search. Combining these was difficult, especially the syntax for querying with SQLite since it was the first time any of us had worked on it, and we combined it with other search methods. Additionally, CSS was another challenge as we do not have much experience with frontend development or UI/UX design.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the design of the site, as we believe it is very pleasing to the eye and matches our project’s school-based aesthetic. When we originally brainstormed our project, it had a very broad scope and we are proud of how well we organized and broke it down into individual, attainable goals, as well as how we used Github and handled merge conflicts. Additionally, we had time to implement payment processing and advanced search which were two of our stretch goals.

What we learned

We learned about how to use Flask, especially in a larger project. As we've all had limited experience with full-stack development, this project enabled us to learn coordination and collaboration between different team members, especially because not all of us knew each other at the beginning of the project.

What's next for Stinger Seller

We're going to implement messaging and ensure that buyers have user accounts too. This way we can add bookmarking and more common e-commerce features, as well as cater to our community and security aspects of our project. We also want to add user authentication, specifically to ensure the user has a Georgia Tech account.

Built With

• css
• flask
• html
• python
• sqlite
• stripe