Case Study: Buy, Sell and Exchange Books
University books are expensive for average students, to ease the burden, we need a platform that allows students to buy and exchange new and used books.
Howard Used Books (now part of Howard Book Store)
Project Requirements
- Students should enter book details for other users to view.
- Only users who are registered to the platform can buy and sell books.
- Users should be able to search or filter books they want.
Project Overview
The project was to develop a web application for Howard University students to sell, buy, or exchange used books. For example, if a student completed a Chemistry course, he would create an account in the application, to sell or exchange his book. Other Students would search for the book on the website, then they would purchase it, or exchange it with another book the seller was interested in.
The Challenge
Marketing and scaling the website to 12000+ students.
The Approach & Solution
For our initial analysis, we looked at Amazon and Barnes & Noble used book platforms for the user experience. We interviewed Howard University students to understand their pain points in buying and selling books. After gathering requirements, we focused on the technology tools we needed to build the application and a company to host the website for students to see it. One of our marketing strategies included asking university professors to give us 5 minutes to demo the website to students before classes started. Our technology stack used to build the website included .NET web framework, C# programming language, SQL Server database, and our web hosting company was IONOS.
