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 incurr 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?
Okay, what about you? What if you also wanted to sell that hoodie that is one size too small for you now or your old phone or anything you just wanna sell? Facebook Marketplace came to your mind right. Well yeah, I have used Facebook Marketplace before and it works but your listing gets lost in a plethora of other listings including those south of the border too.
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 cutstomer 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 an 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 you information is permanently erased from our database upon clicking the red delete button
Bambi Market is under active production at the moment and I am considering using it as my graduation project upon further development.
I am working on implementing ajax to prevent 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 will be writing more on the same subject pretty soon. Until then!
