Student-Centric E-Commerce Platform for Local Business Growth

Abstract

E-commerce, especially the marketplace is growing rapidly, offering convenience, accessibility, and an extensive array of products and services. However, the marketplace has become too general, making it challenging for university students to find budget-friendly and locally relevant products for their daily needs and for local businesses to gain visibility. This project addresses the limitations of the current e-commerce marketplace by developing a segmented e-commerce platform for university students. The features implemented in the platform include common marketplace features that have been tailored to align with the platform's objectives, as well as features like university-base filters to prioritize the visibility of products from sellers within the same university as buyers or in the closest proximity and dedicated section for local business promotion. The research methodology used for carrying out this project is Extreme Programming (XP) which enhances customer collaboration and responsiveness to changing requirements. This methodology is employed due to the lack of comprehensive research materials and the absence of a closely similar existing system for analysis, coupled with the necessity for rapid implementation based on customer feedback. The key technologies used for the development of the project include Next.js a Javascript framework, MongodDB Atlas a cloud database, Firebase a backend as a service and Aws S3 an object storage service.