Building a Drupal-powered online marketplace for student businesses
Young Enterprise, with support from HSBC Bank, wanted to create a UK-wide platform enabling young people to sell products online while developing digital skills.
Young Enterprise (YE) is a national education charity working with more than a third of schools across England and Wales to help prepare young people for life beyond education. Through a range of programmes and partnerships, it provides practical opportunities for students to develop employability, financial and enterprise skills.
To extend this work into the digital space, the organisation launched an initiative designed to allow students to run small online businesses and sell their products through a dedicated marketplace platform.
For many young people taking part in YE's programmes, selling products online is an important part of learning how businesses operate in the modern world. However, most mainstream ecommerce platforms are not designed with the needs of schools, teachers and under-18s in mind.
YE wanted to create a safe, structured online marketplace where students could present their products, interact with customers and develop practical digital skills. The platform needed to combine the accessibility of established ecommerce marketplaces with strong safeguards and moderation controls suitable for educational environments.
OWA was asked to design and build the new system using Drupal, delivering an initial minimum viable product (MVP) that could evolve over time based on user feedback and programme development.
The new platform needed to replicate many of the familiar elements of an online marketplace while ensuring it remained appropriate for use by students and schools. This required careful consideration of user permissions, moderation processes and safeguarding requirements.
At the same time, the platform needed to be flexible enough to evolve as the programme grew and as feedback was gathered from teachers, students and other stakeholders.
- Create a student-friendly online marketplace platform
- Enable young people to list and sell products online
- Design appropriate permissions and safeguarding controls
- Support multiple user roles including students, teachers and moderators
- Build a scalable MVP that could evolve through future development
The project also took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, requiring the team to collaborate remotely while maintaining close engagement with stakeholders and user testers.
OWA worked in close partnership with Young Enterprise to design and develop the new marketplace platform using Drupal. Early scoping sessions focused on understanding how students would create and manage their businesses, how teachers and parents would oversee activity, and how customers would discover and purchase products.
To ensure the platform was safe and appropriate for young users, we implemented a structured permissions system with multiple levels of approval and moderation. This allowed teachers and parents to guide activity and review listings while still giving students a genuine sense of ownership over their businesses.
The system was delivered as a minimum viable product, enabling the programme to launch and begin gathering feedback from real users. This flexible architecture allows the platform to evolve over time, supporting new functionality and improvements as the programme grows.
The new platform has created a practical digital marketplace where students can gain valuable enterprise and technology skills:
- Secure online marketplace designed specifically for student businesses
- Structured user permissions supporting safeguarding and moderation
- Hands-on experience of ecommerce and digital business skills
- Flexible Drupal architecture allowing ongoing feature development
- Growing adoption across schools participating in the programme
Organisations developing digital platforms for education, communities or emerging businesses often need systems that balance usability, flexibility and strong governance. A phased MVP approach allows platforms to launch quickly while supporting continuous improvement as users engage with the system.
- Design and build bespoke marketplace or portal platforms
- Create structured user roles and approval workflows
- Deliver MVP platforms that evolve through iterative development
- Support collaborative design with stakeholders and user testers
- Build scalable Drupal platforms for long-term growth
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