LUMS Marketplace
Secure campus-based buy/sell platform for university students.
What we built
and why.
LUMS Marketplace is a secure campus-based buy/sell platform for verified university students. We built a MERN-stack product with university-email authentication, AI-powered search, integrated real-time chat, and a category system tuned to student life: textbooks, furniture, electronics, rides.
The problem
to solve.
Context
E-Commerce · EdTech : LUMS students were trading on a chaotic set of Facebook groups and WhatsApp threads: no moderation, no search, no safety. The university asked for a controlled alternative restricted to verified campus accounts.
Core Problem
Generic marketplaces lack campus context and safety. Students needed a trusted, campus-only platform where sellers are verified, search actually works, and communication happens in-product rather than across fragmented chats.
How we
built it.
A 6-week lean build. React + Redux on the frontend, Node/Express backend with MongoDB, university-email verification gating, and an AI search layer that outranked naive text matching from week one.
Scope & Auth
Defined MVP listings categories and built the university-email-only auth flow first: security before features.
Listings & Search
Category-aware listings with AI-powered ranking that surfaces relevant results before exact matches.
Chat & Safety
Real-time chat with Socket.io, with in-product reporting, block, and moderation queues.
Launch & Iterate
Soft launch to 200 students, iteration on feedback, then full campus rollout.
What got
shipped.
React SPA talking to an Express REST API backed by MongoDB. Socket.io for real-time chat, Cloudinary for image hosting, Redis for session cache, and a lightweight ranking service that applies weights to freshness, distance, and category.
Key Innovations
- Email-domain-gated signup (only @lums.edu.pk addresses accepted)
- AI-ranked search that beat naive Mongo text search on recall
- In-app chat threads tied to each listing for full context
- Reputation system with seller ratings and flagged-listing workflow
Obstacles Overcome
- Keeping listings quality high without heavy manual moderation
- Handling image uploads cheaply at campus-wide scale
- Migration path off the old Facebook groups the student body was used to
What it
does.
5 core capabilities that define the product. Each engineered with a senior team, tested against real usage, and shipped to production.
Campus Trading
Safe marketplace restricted to verified campus users.
AI-Powered Search
Intelligent product discovery engine with recommendations.
Integrated Chat
Real-time communication system for buyers and sellers.
Secure Auth
Educational-email-based login system for maximum trust.
Categorized Listings
User-friendly portal for trading textbooks and essentials.
The product,
end to end.
10screens from the shipped build. Every flow, every state. These aren’t renders, they’re production.
The impact,
measured.
Replaced an ungoverned Facebook-group economy with a single trusted marketplace, reducing scam reports, improving transaction completion rates, and giving the university visibility into what had been invisible activity.
Built with.
A marketplace earns trust by being boring in all the right ways. LUMS Marketplace shipped that boring-trustworthy feeling in six weeks.
Got a project that
needs this kind of build?
Tell us the problem. We’ll tell you if it’s a 2-week sprint or a 2-month platform, honestly, in the first call.
