c/o nicksng.com
WesMarketplace—a website for members of the University community to buy and sell used goods—went live for beta testing with about 100 users on April 7, 2023. After testing for a week without any major hiccups, the creator Nick Sng ’23 made the website accessible to the entire University community on April 14, 2023. Sng created WesMarketplace last spring after realizing during his first year that there wasn’t an efficient way for students to get rid of the still-functioning appliances and other useful items that collect outside of dorms and houses at the end of each school year.
Though WasteNot and the WesThrift Facebook group existed at the time, Sng found that neither presented perfect models: WasteNot often has hour-long lines and runs out of highly coveted items quickly, and Facebook groups are not well-structured for buying and selling.
“Facebook groups are not made to sell stuff,” Sng wrote in an email to The Argus. “In a Facebook group, you can’t really search or filter for stuff. And it was all pretty common for students to comment on a post asking, ‘Oh, is this item still available?’ So there wasn’t a simple way for resellers to mark the item as sold.”
Although Sng conceptualized the idea of an online marketplace in his first year, he did not acquire the tools to build it until his senior year, when he took a student forum titled “How To Build a Social Media App,” taught by Logan Brown ’23. Along with two other students in the class, Anh Nguyen ’23 and Emet Cohen ’23, Sng built a workable prototype for the final project of the course. However, Sng wanted to take the project further and landed on bubble.io, a no-code website building tool.
“I spent the winter of 2022 learning bubble…and I decided to create a website instead of a native mobile app because I didn’t want users to have to download another app,” Sng said. “And over the spring semester of this year, I spent all the time I had out of class building WesMarketplace.”
Sng originally funded the project out of his own pocket, covering the cost of bubble.io himself at $30 a month, but eventually applied for a $360 seed grant from the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. The full award was granted.
Within the final six weeks of the spring 2023 semester, the site had 491 users, 443 listings, and 82 items sold or donated. The median price of an item was $5.00. Although sales have slowed down a little this semester–as Sng mentioned, they are seasonally dependent, with more people selling items at the end of the year during move out–sales are expected to pick up with the regular ebb and flow of campus commerce.
Sellers on the site have expressed satisfaction with the functions available, agreeing that it has presented a big improvement over previous selling options.
“It’s great to have a dedicated space and streamlined platform to make transactions and posting easier,” Eden Ho ’25, a seller on the website, wrote in an email to The Argus. “The automatic contact info drop, the sold button, the UI/UX etc. In my opinion it removed a lot of barriers to the effort you’d have to put in previously to buy and sell clothes.”
This semester, WesMarketplace has expanded to include a dedicated section of the website for WesGo, a program for students to offer rides to other students to hubs like New Haven and Bradley International Airport. WesGo, created by Marc Esposito ’20, was frequently used before the pandemic. However, it was largely forgotten while the University was under heavy restrictions. Esposito reached out to Sng about the collaboration in order to help revive the service.
Looking to the future, Sng doesn’t have any specific plans for WesMarketplace. However, he floated the idea of expanding to other small college campuses and developing a fully operational app to accompany the existing website. Above all, he emphasized the ease of starting such projects for those that have ideas.
“Wesleyan is such a great community,” Sng wrote. “It’s a small community. And if you just want to start something, it’s a great way to test your ideas.”
Leo Bader can be reached at lbader@wesleyan.edu.