As a final year Software Engineering Student studying abroad, It has always bothered me that North Cyprus lacks a single fully functional eCommerce platform for businesses that could handle same-day delivery.
Popular eCommerce platforms such as Amazon and AliExpress deliver to the island but you would have to wait up to a month to get your item delivered or incur extra charges to hasten your delivery not counting the 5% tax levied on all products ordered online by the national post office.
It is also worth noting that there is no deficit of cool and rather poorly marketed businesses on the island that sell really cool products but only in-store. How can they reach more customers?
What if you could have a central place to list your product to sell? Or search for a good deal on a winter jacket? Or just wanna virtually window shop products from stores on the island?
Introducing Bambi Market! Market is the latest platform under the Bambi umbrella. It employs a B2C and C2C model where businesses sell to you the customer and you can also sell to other customers (customer, in this case, used to refer to registered users.)
On Market, you can view recommended products on your home page, like them and have them added to your wishlist, follow other accounts and directly message businesses / other users to inquire about products.
Home
On the Home page, you get to view products recommended to you using a collaborative filtering algorithm. Products recommended are based on what you searched for before, accounts you follow and what they sell and what you liked before. Each listing has a title, image, price, description, relevant tags and the location and contact information of the seller. You can like any listing besides yours and they will be bookmarked in your wishlist.
WishList
Wishlist includes all the listings you liked before. It also includes a suggested accounts section that includes accounts who’s products you liked and similar accounts.
Direct Message
The direct message feature is just as the name states. You can use this feature to directly reach out to accounts to inquire about their listings. You can also use it to interact with businesses directly for further information and product customizations too.
Profile
The profile includes all the listings by the account owner. It also includes the follower count and a verified icon if the account is verified.
Settings
On the settings tab, the user can update their information which includes their name, email and contact information. The user can also delete their account here. Bambi Market takes privacy seriously and it only takes two clicks to delete your account. All your information is permanently erased from our database upon clicking the red delete button
Bambi Market is under active production at the moment. I am working on implementing ajax to prevent the whole page reloads upon commenting, following and liking on posts. I will also implement socket-io for the direct messaging feature and elastic search to include full-text search to the application.
I could really use some help with these. I am seeking someone to work with and push these changes as soon as possible. It is going to be a learning experience for both of us and I really look forward to it. Anyone interested, ping me on Twitter @harunnmohamed
Top comments (2)
Hi, it's a great project. I am happy to contribute.
Hey Mahfuz, happy to hear that! Just DM'ed you on Twitter.