EHarvest

Business Model Canvas
Prototype: Launch Screen/Product Screen/Home Screen
Prototype: Profile Screen/Chat Screen/Sell Screen
APP: Login Screen/Home Screen/View Screen
APP: Sell Screen/Chat Screen/Profile Screen

Inspiration

The idea of EHarvest derives from the Launceston Harvest Market, which gathers the local agricultural products for various customers to choose. However, this traditional way of transactions has certain limitations. For instance, Harvest market only opens for a few hours on Saturday morning, and many people may prefer relaxing at home rather than driving long-distance. Living in the information, we were inspired by the convenience and cost-efficiency of online trading. It is worth mentioning that EHarvest is catered to the situation of Tasmania in that the combination of the traditional agricultural market with the idea of online shopping such as eBay makes the best use of the advantages of both.

Additionally, EHarvest is inventive because of the integration of the logistics industry. For eBay, we noticed that most edible items are long-life preserved due to the delivery issue. Thus, we want to integrate the idea of the supply chain as well. For instance, we will have a few distribution centres dispersed at the various spot. Every morning assigned trucks will collect all products which have been ordered within 24 hours from different farms and sent to distribution centres. Customers can choose their preferred delivery company, or they can go to the nearest distribution centre to pick up their products.

What it does

EHarvest is an online platform which allows the transaction of agricultural products. These products can be categorized in cultivated plants, which includes grain, vegetables, and fruits. It connects the producer of agricultural products with the customer directly. EHarvest provides easy accessibility by the Apple store or Android play store. After downloading our app, anyone can browse the products without creating an account. However, individuals need to create their account on EHarvest if they want to buy, sell, auction, or bid on the product.

Product producers can post multiple products on our platform until the stock lasts and edit the related information including pictures, descriptions, price, payment details and delivery duration.

Buyers can browse available products, search keywords, or explore by categories. Once they find the desired outcome, they can put it in the cart for proceeding the check-out. Buyers can make payments using paypal. Moreover, buyers can choose their preferred way of delivery. The combination of online and offline service allows the choice between self-pickup at the nearest distribution centre as well as the direct doorstep delivery. Timely communication between buyers and sellers is also supported on our platform. They can communicate with each other by messages and keep track of replies.

How I built it

The group members discuss what kind of UI design is user-friendly, then we draw the APP mock-up via Photoshop. After several adjustments and improvements, we determined the layout of the UI. Then we started to develop the project by Xcode 10.3. This project is built by swift and using the Google Cloud database to store data based on the Firebase framework.

Challenges I ran into

During the business model developing processes, challenges were raised, we have to refine our original ideas to more suitable ones. For example, we have faced challenges about the quality control and food security issues regarding to fresh, dairy and other products that required fresh-preservation. Therefore, we have narrowed our product categories into three, which are crops, veggies and fruits.

Moreover, when we discussed the shipment costs and time, the current cases are a huge block. Therefore, an integration operational strategy which combining online trading platform and offline distribution centre was figured out.

Furthermore, when we thought about our business performance prediction, figures problem raises. All the financial forecast should regard to historical performance or similar cases, that was taught in KIT 714 ICT research methods and principles, and can be found in quantitative research part; however, it is hard to find similar case for our project. Therefore, we have done a few researches to find the related figures such as regional population, online trading amount in Australia, eBay users located in Australia, and then formulate all figures together to do the calculation.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We Build an App We are excited that we are actually building an APP based on IOS and achieve the core functions including register user name, list products, searching, purchasing, online communications according to our prototype. We are also proud that we have used our researching skills finished interviews and surveys in Harvest Market. We have confirmed the requirements and demands from our qualitative research and convert these into Apps’ functions.

Market research for this project We have also communicated with food delivery expert Apps to get their suggestions, which can deduct our operational cost for offline delivery services. Barriers are gradually broke up as time goes, by the end, we are pretty confident that our project is practical and beneficial, it also achieves the market particular demands, and we are making users life easier!

What I learned

Through UHack, we not only improve our time management, teamwork and problem-solving skills but also learn a better understanding of project management. We developed an app that can be used for making payment and trading products within 3 days, which greatly improved our ability for fast development. In addition, we also contribute our strengths to the team as one piece of puzzles and enhance communication ability to deal with disagreement during the discussion.

What's next for EHarvest

Eharvest is a 3 stages project, the targets and activities will be various regarding to different stages.

Stage 1: 1-3 months Eharvest will cover local Launceston market, have 3000 activated users. We are starting to release our Android version, and the project will start with seller-oriented strategy, and APP functions such as online trading and payment system will be achieved. Moreover, simple chosen delivery services will be provided by third party carriers such as POST.

Stage 2: 4-9 months EHarvest will be pushed to covering entire Tasmania, more farms will register the APPs as individual sellers. We expected an activated user number to boost to 25000. We plan to allocation more concentration on Apps operational functions and maintenance. Moreover, numbers of warehouse and distribution centre will be set up for offline delivery services, and delivery services will be assigned to outsourcing parties to control the cost. For marketing aspects, more promotion channel such as website, Facebook advertisements will be adopted, and partners and user relationships will be taking care as well.

Stage 3: 10-24 months EHarvest will be pushed to the entire Australia market, and it is expected to become one of the major online trading platforms in Australia. We will spend more time to cost control, seller and product quality control, risk control, security and privacy controls.