I hope everyone is having a great day!! During the Offseason our team (FTC #18737) made a Marketplace for FIRST Teams to buy and sell parts.
Last season our team had a lot of issues getting parts quickly and at an affordable price. We also struggled with fundraising. We heard a lot of similar stories from other rookie teams throughout the season, and we believe that having a common marketplace where we can easily trade, sell and buy parts would be very beneficial for the FIRST community.
Do you have any available parts to list? We would like to get as many parts listed before the season starts so that rookie teams have a chance to get started and professional teams can expand their tools and capabilities.
Please note that the product is in beta and we are looking for any feedback or bugs you may encounter.
You should add a filter to search for FRC, FTC or FLL parts. If the website gets bigger and has too many parts other filters may want to be considered such as categories (electronics, motion, etc. similar to Andymark and Vex) and location (probably just country).
You used the correct FIRST standard logos for the other programs but used the wrong/old one for FRC.
Your header link FIRST Marketplace takes you to another home page with no way back to the Buy page. If your main site starts with the Buy page that title header link should direct to that.
Clicking the contact owner, then shows the please sign in button, clicking that button does nothing. I assume it should direct to the login page.
This site isn’t mobile friendly at all.
How did you architect it, fully custom html, css, js?
We are using React with mostly custom jsx/html, css, and js. We currently are trying to improve the experience for mobile users. Thanks for all of the other feedback, we will definitely take that into consideration!
I would recommend you read carefully FIRST’s use of FIRST and LEGO trademarks document and think about how it applies to your site. Despite the fact you’re a FIRST team, using the logos may not be okay, and the site name overall may also be problematic due to the fact it may cause confusion (e.g. people might think this is a site run by FIRST itself). Most team-run projects avoid this by in some way using the team name instead of the FIRST name (Chief Delphi is one obvious example).
At first glance of this thread and before reading, I 100% thought FIRST had rolled out a new platform/site called “FIRST marketplace”.
Perhaps even something as simple as a note on the landing page giving credit to your team for creating and maintaining the site, to help alleviate some confusion.
When registering for an account, I would greatly prefer to just enter my city and state instead of sharing my location with the site. Otherwise, I like the idea a lot, so I hope this does pretty well!