An Application For Online Commodity And Delivery System

ABSTRACT

Individuals shop regularly including weekday and weekends but most people find their free time on weekends to shop for important products like groceries. Studies show that about 60 million people shop on weekends and online in Nigeria. The difficult part of shopping online is the act of waiting on long queues and with the recent pandemic, people are now more reluctant to join those queues. The purpose of this project was to create an E-Commerce mobile application that is dedicated to enabling customers purchase goods and shop effectively online during the Covid-19 pandemic. The issue of the pandemic and the goal of reducing physical contact has motivated several vendors to participate in online shopping. Even before the current pandemic, the SARS pandemic of 2003 brought about a rise in E-Commerce. This brought about the birth of the likes of Ali-Baba. Nigerian E-Commerce companies followed suit years later with the likes of Jumia and Konga. E-Commerce represented a massive economic push of buying goods and offering services through online platforms. It provided customers the ability to also make online payments securely without any issues. Following the requirements and specifications, the application was created in a way that focuses on the customer ordering commodities from the comfort of their homes. The end user would be able to place their order online, get billed, and make payment to have their goods delivered. The commodities that have been listed on the application included grocery, vegetable and fruit, medicine, health and body care. The application provides customer with options of selecting vendors according to their location. The application also permits vendors that do not have physical stores to sell their products. In this project, the application would help people avoid standing on long queues and catching the virus: 1) The application will allow them choose their products of choice into their shopping cart, 2) Confirm that the products selected are what they wish to purchase 3) Confirm the purchase and pay for the products using pay stack or cancel the purchase 4) A receipt is generated for the purchased items including date and time of delivery. Once payment is made, the customer receives an order confirmation in their e-mail. The application also stores the customer previous shopping list to make it easier for them to select the same products and fulfil their shopping needs. The application product search feature will also enable the user know when quickly whether a product is out of stock. The software has been developed using Erwin, Visual Paradigm, Android Studio, Heroku, Cloudinary, Github, Laravel and Flutter. Also, third party API’s and Licences like Pay stack was implemented for secure payment. This E- Commerce application has been designed to be in a mobile platform and to run on android devices. Chapter 1 introduces the project topic including the scope of the study together with the aims and objectives. Chapter 2 introduces the literature review including historical overview and similar E-Commerce application products. Chapter 3 involves the analysis and design of the application, methodology and the requirement specifications. Chapter 4 is the testing of the application with its main features and a user guide for the end user. Chapter 5 includes the limitations of the application and the recommendations to help solve these limitations.