Online Shopping System with Extended Functionality: A Hybrid Sales and Rental Model

The sudden boom of e-commerce has revolutionized the retail sector, especially in the area of fashion and apparel. Nevertheless, traditional platforms are mostly sales-oriented, not fully responding to concerns of affordability and sustainability. This paper describes the design of an Online Shopping System with Extended Functionality (OSSEF), a hybrid system that com- bines both sales of clothes and rental services in one system. The system has been designed with modules for user management, inventory management, payment processing, review, and returns management. Developed with PHP and MySQL in the back-end and HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the front-end, the system follows a three-tier architecture that includes strong security and scalability features. Results show that the OSSEF enhances consumer affordability, enables sustainable fashion practices through reusing garments, and provides a scalable solution that can be used to accommodate future AI-based personalization and blockchain-based rental tracking.