ARCHIVE — A C2C Marketplace for Premium Second-hand Fashion

The problem: when the pre-owned luxury market is missing the one thing that matters most — trust

ARCHIVE is a concept for a C2C e-commerce platform for the premium second-hand fashion market in Vietnam. The project grew out of a real gap in the pre-owned luxury market: a lack of trust and transparency, with risks ranging from counterfeit goods, inaccurate descriptions, deal-breaking, item swapping, to a complete absence of transaction protection. Buyers feared counterfeits or losing money through unofficial channels, while sellers struggled with pricing, reaching the right customers, building credibility, and handling post-transaction risk.

Rather than functioning as just a listing site, ARCHIVE was designed as a Market Creator platform, connecting buyers and sellers through verification mechanisms, escrow payments, and a bid/ask pricing system. The goal was to create a more transparent trading environment with user verification, product moderation, escrow payments, and a dispute resolution system.

Role: market research, seller workflow, and UI/UX

Within a 5-person team, led several areas covering market research, business model analysis, seller workflow design, and UI/UX:

• Defined the target audience and research scope
• Analyzed the seller-side workflow
• Helped build the platform’s value proposition
• Analyzed market dynamics and consumer trends
• Analyzed indirect competitors
• Designed the user interface, particularly the seller-side interface
• Built the platform’s development roadmap
• Wrote the results summary, built the presentation slides, and proofread the full content for quality

The process: from a market pain point to a structured business model

The workflow followed these steps:

1. Identify the market problem and rationale for the topic
2. Define the target audience and research scope
3. Analyze buyers, sellers, and competitor groups
4. Design the platform’s operating workflow
5. Build the value proposition for the Escrow and Bid/Ask models
6. Analyze market dynamics and consumer trends (high-end resale, Gen Z, Millennials, HENRYs, sustainable consumption)
7. Analyze direct and indirect competitors
8. Design the UI/UX for the user modules
9. Build the platform’s development roadmap
10. Synthesize the results, edit the report, and prepare the slides

The most invested part was the seller-side workflow and interface. Designing this section required thinking from the seller’s perspective: how would they list a product, get verified, manage pricing and orders, receive payment via Escrow, and build credibility on the platform.

Results

• Completed a business model for a C2C e-commerce platform for the premium second-hand luxury market
• Built transaction workflows for sellers, buyers, and administrators
• Proposed two core value propositions: Escrow payments and a Bid/Ask matching mechanism
• Analyzed market opportunity based on trends in high-end resale, Gen Z, Millennials, HENRYs, and sustainable consumption
• Analyzed direct and indirect competitors to identify the market gap
• Designed illustrative interfaces for the platform’s main modules
• Built a multi-phase development roadmap from MVP to market expansion

What I’m proudest of

This project clarified that an e-commerce idea isn’t built from interface or features alone — it comes from analyzing the market, identifying the core problem, building a revenue model, and designing the entire transaction journey. It also deepened understanding of E-commerce concepts more broadly, particularly marketplace dynamics, trust mechanisms, escrow, bid/ask pricing, seller journeys, and platform strategy.

The biggest takeaway

The project taught how to analyze a niche e-commerce market, how to identify buyer and seller pain points, and how to build a value proposition for a digital platform. It clarified the role of trust in C2C transactions, how to design the seller and buyer journey within a marketplace, how to analyze direct and indirect competitors, and most importantly, how to translate a business model into an interface and operational workflow — understanding the importance of connecting market strategy, revenue model, business process, and UI/UX.

Limitations

The project stayed at the research, model design, and prototype stage and wasn’t implemented as an actual website. Technologies like AI Authentication, Escrow, eKYC, and Bid/Ask remained at the proposal stage. The model wasn’t validated with real users or actual transaction data. Some legal, data security, and dispute-handling questions would need further research before any real-world deployment.

If I did it again

• Conduct an actual user survey to validate market demand
• Build a more complete interactive prototype for buyers, sellers, and admin
• Build more detailed user flows for disputes, refunds, and product moderation
• Clarify the legal questions around Escrow, eKYC, and platform liability
• Add a dashboard tracking operational KPIs such as GMV, conversion rate, listing approval rate, and dispute rate
• If time allowed, build an MVP frontend to simulate a real transaction experience