Modern car shopping is fairly dull. All you know about a car is the make, model, year, general condition, and its estimated price; buyers know nothing about the car's life. How did the owner treat their vehicle? What is the history behind this car? Were there any accidents? How bad was the accident? These are all questions car shoppers ponder over, and don't always have the answers to. In addition, the answers to these questions potentially influence a customer's decision when purchasing a vehicle. So, we created Car Bazaar in order to revolutionize the online car shopping experience.
Car Bazaar is a car-shopping tool that is centered around the story behind a car. On top of the features on sites like Kelly Blue Book, car shoppers get a more personalized experience with features such as a user's garage and the custom marketplace. Every user who registers on Car Bazaar has the option of adding the cars they own to their virtual garage and can add media and history about their cars. Once a car is added to your garage, you can mark it as 'selling' and post it to the marketplace, or just leave it for display. On the home page, all cars can be searched based on their make and model. Car Bazaar will be also be able to provide a secure opportunity for selling and purchasing cars, since each user must be logged in and authenticated before adding or editing cars in their garages.
Car Bazaar was built using Google Cloud Platform (Firebase), Flask, Git, HTML/CSS, and Python.
We struggled with setting up credentials for Firebase Storage and syncing the images stored in Firebase to the car's profile on our website. This was resolved by re-evaluating the URLs for the buckets that we were passing in, as well as re-evaluating the rules for the database. We also had some issues with writing new posts to Firebase, but this was also resolved by standardizing the format of our JSON objects.
We learned a lot about integrating Firebase' databases with flask-based websites, using Python. We also learned about user authentication, also using Firebase, and storing and retrieving user-specific data.
There are millions of people in the world that value cars as more than just a tool. Whether the car is a hypercar, daily driver, or a classic, consumers can appreciate a car's backstory. Imagine you have to pick between a 2015 Honda Civic EX that has very minimal information or the same car but with a picture of it at the Grand Canyon, interesting stories, and more background information. You would definitely pick the car with more information about it. Even if a person views a car as a tool, they can rest assured that the previous owner took care of their vehicle.