UniTrade

This paper has presented UniTrade, a peer-to-peer campus marketplace application designed to address the fragmentation of academic resource trading among university students. The system is implemented as a cross-platform mobile application using React Native (Expo SDK 54) and Google Firebase Firestore, and incorporates a real-time notification subsystem, a category-driven listing marketplace with User Exclusion logic, a student Request Board, and server-side Firestore Security Rules that enforce data ownership at the database layer. The architectural contributions of this work — particularly the User Exclusion filter, the demand-broadcasting Request Board, and the client-side notification persistence model — collectively address user experience requirements that are not satisfied by the general-purpose platforms currently used for campus commerce. The server-side security model ensures that data integrity guarantees cannot be circumvented by client-side manipulation, providing a trust foundation appropriate for a community-scoped marketplace. Future work will focus on three primary directions. First, the integration of Firebase Cloud Storage and a camera-enabled image upload flow in the SellItem screen will allow sellers to post photographs of the specific item being offered, enabling buyers to assess condition prior to initiating contact. Second, the development of an in-app real-time chat feature — potentially built on Firestore's document listener model — will eliminate the requirement to exchange personal telephone numbers as a prerequisite for negotiation, reducing the platform's trust barrier for new users. Third, the application of collaborative filtering or content-based recommendation algorithms to the listing feed — informed by a user's browsing history and category preferences — will improve the relevance of the default marketplace view as the listing volume scales beyond the capacity of manual browsing. UniTrade demonstrates that domain-specific, mobile-first marketplace applications can materially improve the efficiency, security, and sustainability of P2P commerce within bounded communities. The architectural patterns described in this paper — real-time listener-based state synchronization, server-enforced data ownership, and client-side relevance filtering — are generalizable to analogous community marketplace contexts beyond the campus environment.

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