eMarket for Local Farmers

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic is a global health crisis that has brought an impact on everyone. A negative impact has made local farmers struggle to find their means of income other than selling their crops to their customers. The customers have had difficulties searching for good quality fresh produce other than from the supermarket. The purpose of this paper is twofold: firstly, to assess the manual and existing system on how consumers acquire their fresh produce during the Covid-19 pandemic, to design and implement a delivery system for local farmers to vend their fresh produce through a mobile application; and secondly, to test and evaluate the usability and functionality of the online farmers' market application. The existing mobile applications have changed everyone's approach in acquiring the daily essentials that the pandemic has brought. Therefore, the idea of developing an online marketplace for local farmers resulted in the proposed application, which will be explained in this paper. Rapid Application Development (RAD) was used as the methodology for the development of the eMarket application. A survey was conducted via Google form for twenty local farmers and another twenty potential customers during the pre-development stage. It was to collect data on the users' opinions regarding the proposed application. We then conducted the usability testing through Google form to collect the users' feedback on the eMarket application. Ten local farmers from Matang's market have participated in the testing phase. Additionally, ten students from a local university participated as potential customers in the usability testing. As a result of these testings, we have developed a usable farmer's market application that has been well-received by local farmers and customers.