Web Based Vehicle Classifieds Portal

Abstract

Buying and selling of used vehicles in Sri Lanka was done via newspaper advertisements, over the telephone communication and through brokers some time ago. The process of buying or selling of a vehicle took from few weeks to many months to complete the deal. Buyers and sellers were often victims of fraud deals due to lack of knowledge and expertise in the subject area. In the recent past increased internet usage in Sri Lanka has encouraged the adaptation of internet based buying and selling of vehicles. For example autolanka.com and ikman.lk is couple of leading firms in the field. Though they are the leaders, they lack certain features that would help provide seamless overall user experience. For example autolanka.com follows a manual advertisement posting procedure which takes 3-4 days, and lacks the ability to let the user to elaborate vehicle options other than air conditioning, power mirror, power shutter etc. Also its user interfaces and user experience quality is not adequate and site seems out-dated while ikman.lk is a general classifieds portal which lacks subject matter specific features and it only provides a description section to provide vehicle options and none of them provides unbiased reviewing mechanism or quality verification of the vehicles, a service which is usually provided by second hand vehicle auctions like Punchi Car Niwasa or Malambe Riyapola. The main objective of the proposed solution is to encourage buyers and sellers of vehicles to use internet based buying and selling of vehicles. Further, solution facilitates users to post, browse and search advertisements. Solution facilitates vehicle reviewing process and user preference based advertisement suggestions. In perspective of administration and managerial aspects, the solution provides an interface to manage user activity and advertisement for administration and dash board for managerial level users to monitor sites business performance. Requirements were gathered via discussion and interviews with stakeholders, studying similar systems and referring web resources. Identified requirements, actors are mentioned in later chapters in detail. Layered architecture was adapted as the base design for the solution whereas relational database model was used for data design. Solution was implemented based on Microsoft .NET Framework and Microsoft SQL Server. Log4Net, Flotr2, RDLC, Entity Framework was used to facilitate the development. Unit tests were developed in the implementation of the solution. Further solution was tested against test cases covering positive and negative scenarios. Beta test was performed for a selected set functionality to evaluate the usability of the solution. Solution is only available in English language. Implementing Sinhala and Tamil languages can be suggested as major area for improvement.