A marketplace that puts aquarium buyers and sellers in touch
An e-commerce platform that connects aquarium buyers and sellers directly. Posting, search, filtering and in-listing messaging sit together, with a Q&A forum feeding the trade under the same roof.
- Product
- Lepisteshane
- Field
- E-commerce · Marketplace
- Year
- 2026
Problem
Aquarium trading ran inside group chats. Listings could not be searched or filtered by city and price, and a seller's history was invisible. Buyers had no way to judge who to trust, and sellers lost their listing within a week. On top of that, the group filled up at 1,024 members.
Requirement
Buyers needed to find the fish they were after, and sellers needed to publish a listing in minutes. The binding constraint: a hobbyist on a phone who isn't comfortable with technology should be able to post a listing without asking anyone for help.
→Solution
We put the marketplace at the centre. A listings board filtered by city, condition and price, private messaging inside each listing and a seller profile form the backbone. Around it sits a categorised Q&A forum and live chat rooms. The forum is not decoration: buyers ask before they buy, and the same pages bring in new buyers from search. Every screen was left with a single primary action.
How we approached it
- 01
The product principle was reduced to one sentence: a 55-year-old hobbyist should be able to post a listing unaided. Every design decision was measured against it.
- 02
Email verification is only required to post a listing; reading and asking questions need no account at all.
- 03
Listings close automatically after 30 days, heading off the dead-listing problem that turns marketplaces into graveyards.
- 04
Forum categories are named in the hobby's own language — water chemistry, diseases, planted tanks — rather than generic headings, so they match what people search for.
- 05
No money moves through the site; buyer and seller talk directly. Not brokering payments removes both the legal burden and a large amount of product complexity.
Screens
Outcomes
We keep outcomes qualitative rather than claim numbers we haven't measured.
A searchable, permanent archive
A question asked once becomes a lasting page; the next person with the same problem finds the answer through search.
Usable without signing up
Reading the forum and browsing listings needs no account; registration only comes into play when creating content.
No ceiling on growth
There is no membership cap; the structure holds as the community grows.
Visible seller history
A seller's past listings and profile are visible, so buyers can make a judgement before trading.
Built with
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- Neon
- Tailwind CSS
- Vercel
If you have a question, let us start there.
Tell us what you are trying to do. On the first call we will tell you whether we are the right fit, roughly how long it takes and how we would approach it. No sales pitch.
orsenyazilim@gmail.com