Second-Hand Marketplace Platform – ShareMate

Abstract

With the growing demand for affordable and sustainable consumption, users are increasingly turning to peer-to-peer rental and resale platforms. However, existing marketplaces like OLX and Quikr often face challenges related to trust, verification, and data transparency, which discourage users from engaging confidently. Low user trust, fraudulent listings, and inefficient transaction handling are examples of hidden issues that can compromise user safety and platform reliability. Existing systems do not have an integrated, community-focused approach; instead, they rely solely on basic user ratings and fragmented listings. This paper presents ShareMate, a community-driven second-hand rental and resale platform designed to ensure secure, verified, and transparent exchanges among users. The platform uses AI-driven recommendations and multi-layered verification to scan listings for hidden risks, and generates complete trust and sustainability reports. Furthermore, the system integrates smart deposit handling and sustainability tracking, allowing users to better understand the positive environmental impact of their resource reuse. By integrating multi-content threat detection with consequence visualization, this work proposes a unified solution to improve cybersecurity awareness and promote safe online practices. The rapid growth of online rental and resale platforms underscores the need for trustworthy, transparent, and sustainable systems to serve both urban and semi-urban communities. Existing second-hand marketplaces, such as OLX and Quikr, are often fragmented, unregulated, and struggle to establish user confidence due to a lack of structured frameworks and effective verification mechanisms.