leejhlouis/balaitani

An e-commerce web app designed as a platform for connecting small farmers to buyers directly to prevent middlemen from inflating the retail costs built with Bootstrap and Laravel.

BalaiTani

BalaiTani (roughly translated from Indonesian as farmers' hall) is an e-commerce web app designed as a platform for connecting small farmers to buyers directly to avoid middlemen from inflating the retail costs. This project was built with Bootstrap and Laravel and hosted with Heroku.

Visit the web app here

Overview

BalaiTani was created for the COMP6640001 - Software Engineering course’s final project by Beni, Jevon, and me.

The problem

Despite living in the world’s largest agricultural country, Indonesian farmers continue to struggle with making enough money due to the exploitation of retail prices by the middlemen. The farmers have to rely on those middlemen due to their lack of knowledge of market trends. In fact, they are unaware that the middlemen buy the crops at low prices and sell them at increased prices in the market.

A solution

We came up with a solution—building an e-commerce platform to connect the farmers to the buyers on their own without having to rely on the middlemen. This does not require them to have comprehensive knowledge of market trends to sell their product on their own.

However, potential cheats caused by the middlemen imposing as farmers may happen. To prevent that from happening, the application requires sellers to have their identities verified before authorizing them to sell crops on the e-commerce platform, further decreasing the illicit actions done by the middlemen.

This further leads to lower retail costs in the marketplace and more profit gained by the farmers, subsequently lowering the cost of living across the nation. The lower the cost of living, the higher the chance for the nation to prosper.

Technologies

For faster development, the front end of the web app was built with Bootstrap thanks to its pre-existing templates, while the back end of the web app was built with Laravel, a PHP full-stack framework implementing the model–view–controller (MVC) architecture. Additionally, MySQL was chosen as the database management system (DBMS).

How to run the project locally

Prerequisites

Make sure to have git, composer, and npm installed on your local computer first.

Follow these steps to run the project locally

1. Clone the repository onto your local computer.
2. Change directory to your project
3. Install composer dependencies

composer install

4. Install npm dependencies

npm install

5. Make a copy of .env.example and rename it to .env

php artisan key:generate

6. Create a database for this project using your preferred database tool.
7. Configure your .env file to connect to the database you recently created.
8. Migrate the database

php artisan migrate

9. Seed the database

php artisan db:seed

11. Start the development server

php artisan serve

12. Congratulations, you've successfully run the project locally!