Founders Mohammad Khan and Tommy Adey, who both study Aeronautical Engineering, got their idea off the ground last October and now have 6,000 registered users at universities across the country.
The website has similar features to both Gumtree and eBay, with over 3,500 listings of items ranging from text books and bicycles to computer equipment.
CollegeStall has been supported by Basecamp, the University of Bristol’s student start-up support service, which has nurtured the website’s marketing strategy and helped it grow. The next stage is incorporating student deals and discounts to further help save money.
Tommy, 19, said: “We’ve now got 6,000 registered users and 3,500 listings, which is a great start. We see it as being a useful website for students up and down the country because it can help them save money in a variety of ways and also facilitate other aspects of university life such as finding housing and part-time work.”
Each university has its own homepage on CollegeStall with a 'virtual corkboard' where anyone can add, drag and resize their notice to a size and position of their choice. The search facility enables users to search for listings in any city or university, or throughout the UK.
The student housing feature boasts an automatic display of walking directions and duration to the users' university, the ability to subscribe to a particular housing search and the ability to filter houses by a nine or twelve month duration.
Each user also has a social profile which displays their trustworthiness so that buyers have an idea of who they are transacting with.
Mohammad, 20, said: “University can often be an isolated environment where societies or Facebook aren't always the answer. Our long term vision is to provide a renowned resource which allows students to save money, get things done and broaden their list of contacts and experiences during their time in university and beyond.”
A second money-saving service for students has also been launched by University of Bristol alumnus Hugo Bailey. UniList.co.uk is a not-for-profit second-hand book exchange website which provides a free service to search by city to find textbooks at a fraction of the retail price, and allows users to filter by subject and edition before viewing the results on a map to see the closest result to them.
UniList has teamed up with the University of Bristol’s Student Union to offer a more specific service for Bristol students from the UBU website.