coolcatcollectibles

After graduating and moving back down to Southern California, I was left devoid of the amount of networking resources and social activities I had back at my university. Over there, finding a quick job or joining a team to develop with was significantly easier than my environment in the suburbs. During this time, I had a part-time blue-collar job painting for my dad's small construction business but that also rendered my schedule quite mercurial. In my free time, I decided that I should try my best to network, prepare for employment, and study for the things I want to study for(particularly the Security+ exam). But I also realized that this short gap would also take a toll on my technologic skills, and I wanted a way to make some passive income all whilst practicing and honing the knowledge I was already learning. This included facets such as web development, automation, systems administration, and IT practices.

At this point of time, I was already playing around with a lot of api's and particularly I had written a short and simple script that would help me snipe undervalued items on eBay. While it may seem sophisticated, it really wasn't all that as it sounds; it was more of an advanced querying tool that was simply better than the one they give you on the default site. It simply sorted the different listings by multiple filters including useful sets such as 'ending-soonest' and 'lowest price'. The idea was to simply get a feel for the api in order to get some utility out of it, so sophistication wasn't exactly a goal. With that being said, it proved to be useful because I was about to purchase around 8000 comics for $600.

After a day of lugging around each massive box with my tiny body frame, my entire room was filled with comic book boxes. I couldn't walk without accidentally stubbing my toe against one of the boxes. Regardless, while my inner-child was really resonating with these comic books, I also knew that I had to offload them- which aligned well with my short-term goal of making some passive income. During this time, I had spent a considerable amount of time in my 'product-knowledge-acquisition' phase; these weren't rare by any means, but they were definitely not worthless. After a lot of organization, I realized the timeframe I had to sell these comic books was actually the biggest factor in determining the ultimate price. While collector's and enthusiasts would probably value these are a dollar a piece, I knew that given a longer sales-period, there would be more potential customers looking at these items, and eventually they would sell- I wasn't in any rush to offload all of these comics. So I decided to price them at $9.99 a piece.

So with that in mind, I considered inventory and product-listings to be an upmost priority. With an organized inventory database I would easily be able to export it to CSV and eventually through some e-commerce api like eBay or Shopify. Having an organized inventory also meant that I would be able to tackle multiple enterprise e-commerce platforms at once, such as easily being able to create 8000 listings on eBay but also the same 8000 listings on etsy.

With the premise of this project being to utilize the skills i've acquired throughout the years, my initial plan was to create an e-commerce junction independent of paid-services(This was a one-person operation after all). As such, the prototype had to be not only functional but also rapidly developed. Given an unlimited amount of time, developing a functional product would be no issue, however with restrictions placed on time I had to utilize all the resources I had as well as consistently widen my knowledge horizon of what technologies and frameworks I could potentially use to speed up the process. At this time, I had multiple web projects that were being re-iterated through, mostly consisting of my personal site, a job-tracking application, and an educational platform to help people train for the CompTIA Security+ exam. I decided that ultimately it was best to hit 4 birds with 1 stone- designing components that were easily reusable and modular enough to be used for all of these web applications.

As such, I worked on creating template projects so that I would easily be able to apply to all of these projects. That way I could work on multiple projects at once. These templates included:

• Routing for common pages(Home, about, profile, etc)
• Common styling elements(navbars, headers, adjustable body-cards)
• Common backend functionalities(CRUD db queries, filtering, sorting, user authentication)
• Cloud Deployment templates for servers(Scripts to pre-configure virtual machines that would later on host the development/production environment)

The finished prototype, while a bit devoid of intricate stylings, was a fully functional shopping website where users could sort through products and eventually purchase them. It even had fully written features such as payment processing through the Stripe-API, email notifications, and an automated way to process orders.

showcase coming soon

Although I would have loved to use this as the final product and continue iterating upon it, I also needed a lot more time than I had, so while initially I wanted to cater towards a fully independent platform, I found that I was in a position where there were too many things that needed adjusting while on contrast there were already many services out there that would fulfill my needs. One issue I had run into was proper logging for order types. This wouldn't have been a problem if I was selling 1 or 2 products, but instead I was selling about 8000+ products, each with different characteristics that create discrepancies for pricing and tagging. The amount of manual data entry that was to be done outweighed the amount of time I had and the resources available- I was met with a decision to choose between autonomy or conveinience because I could either spend weeks creating the proper database functions to catalog each product and order, or I could use a service like the Shopify API to manage my inventory. I decided to compromise between the two. I would use the shopify api to fill in the gaps for proper logging and order fulfillment while I continue to iterate upon the pre-existing design. When the design completes, I would transition from the Shopify API to my own.

coming soon