Renting Marketplace Development for the Asian Startup Factory

The local marketplace for product rental is one more product we have built during our productive collaboration with the Japanese Startup Factory. The leading company partner is a well-known robotics businessman in Japan.

The idea for the project emerged in response to the global eco-needs resulting from an over-dependence on consumption. Instead of spending money and other japan shopping websites to buy new goods, platform users can just rent the items they need from their owners for a while.

We started with the MVP development, which contained only basic functionality for early adopters and sales. Later the project was enhanced with a custom design and additional bells and whistles, which made the platform more convenient and attractive.

What makes it so outstanding?

Liruca is a Japanese marketplace where you can lease goods and find people interested in renting them for a fixed period. It is a good solution when, let’s say, you need a bread maker, a construction tool, or a jacket for a while, and you do not want to buy a new one.

There are two roles on the platform: user and super-admin. The first has a personal account where they can see the items rented or leased, personal information, and chats with other users. The other has access to analytics on all products and payments made through the platform, as well as access to editing content on the platform.

The marketplace is fully localized for the Japanese market and is currently in the pre-launch stage.

Before starting development, the Corpsoft.io team performed marketing research on the future product’s audience. We reviewed the results of previous marketing research on this topic, as well as directly communicated with notable target audience members to see if our product would be relevant to them. We also identified the target audience’s pains and needs, which we considered and addressed in the final product.

For example, the product search function appeared on the map because many people found the product location to be the deciding factor rather than its price or other attributes.

This marketplace has many helpful features that we want to mention, but we will focus on the key ones:

We dedicated one whole sprint to creating this feature as it is one of the essential advantages of the platform. Users can search for products by title, category, or location.

The synonym and typo recognition system makes it an intelligent search, that is, one that analyzes the user’s query and selects the most relevant results.

In addition, to displaying search results as a list, the user can open a built-in map and select products by location. When a user clicks on a product card, it extends with basic information such as the product title, photo, price, and a brief description.

The function is implemented with the Google Maps API integration, which makes the image relevant at any time.

We have implemented an internal payment function for a better user experience. The user only needs to specify the rent period and pay for the rental after the item owner’s confirmation.

We examined several options for payment systems and came up with the conclusion that the best solution would be Stripe. And since we have been well versed in this system for a while, its implementation did not take much time, and now the function works like clockwork.

An essential aspect of the platform is security to protect users from scammers. And one of the ways is a user verification system via phone number confirmation.

To implement this feature, we used the well-known Twilio API integration. The system sends a code to the user’s phone number, which must be entered in a space. Besides user verification, the function can also be used to receive notifications via SMS.

The tech stack for this marketplace was chosen due to several factors: we needed fast integrations with APIs of external resources, efficient search, and processing of large amounts of data. So we opted for PHP 7.4, HTML 5, Vue.js, and MySQL.

Additionally, we used tools such as Twilio, Gmail, Zoom, Slack, and Google Spreadsheets.