Currently, there are is a facebook groups called "Looping in a time of covid" where diabetics sell supplies to each other for a lot cheaper than if they bought them new. These people there are usually type 1 diabetic, which is when the immune system turns on you and attacks your insulin cells. I've seen people selling $500 worth of glucose sensors for $200. The group has 1800 members. Very active as people need supplies these supplies for life, such as glucose sensors that sit on the skin for 10 days each. People have extra of these due to switching sensor brands, insulin pump brands, or getting a new health insurance that leaves them with extra from their last plan. Listing them on a facebook group is no very intuitive. I thought that there should be a dedicated marketplace to sell them. My idea was that shipping, payment, and verification to prevent flippers, all could be built into this marketplace. Of course I did not get there though after deploying a lightly modified medusa starter.
Most of the frontend and all of the backend was done by a open source framework called Medusa. Next.js on the frontend, express + postgres + redis on the backend. I did not touch the backend thoughn except the config files. Medusa comes with a bunch of pre-built functionality. It's made by a small startup in Denmark, friendly peeps.
I had to follow the docs to configure the backend and host it on Railway. Initially I used local file storage for images, but after having thumbnails disappear after a few days, I set up a s3 bucket to store them and configured the backend s3 plugin to point to my bucket. The docs actually had an error about how the s3 url should be written, it was missing the region part in the url. With a helpful and experienced community member's help in the discord, I was able to fix it after 2 hours and notified the Medusa technical writer who fixed it in no time. And being able to talk to the Medusa team on discord was pretty neat
I modifed the frontend from the starter to make it look like it's for diabetes and added a few dummy products. The website is nonfunctional and I decided not to move further with it because the amount of time I'd have to sink to learn Medusa. The API is intimidating. And then I'd have to convince people from switching from facebook to my website. And set up moderation. And most type 1 diabetic's have insurance that covers their supplies as far as I know so it's a niche problem. The time isn't worth the impact. It was a nice intro to Medusa though and how people can help each other in a community. The open source spirit was there.