CASE STUDY

Innovative Farming
Marketplace

Enabling eCommerce for
Agricultural Entrepreneurs

Team

  • Project Manager
  • Fullstack Tech Lead
  • Backend Developer
  • Front-End Developer
  • QA
  • UX/UI Design Senior Designer

Challenge

This agricultural eCommerce platform set out to revolutionize how farmers across the U.S. sell their products, seeking to empower local farmers by providing them with a digital marketplace. Budget constraints and the need for a scalable, community-focused platform presented a significant challenge. The platform needed to facilitate direct connections between farmers and consumers, offering easy-to-use tools for product management, sales, and logistics, without farmers relying on traditional market venues.

 

Value Delivered

Distillery collaborated closely with the agricultural eCommerce client to build a headless Shopify platform using Webkul’s Multi Vendor Plugin, enabling farmers to create, manage, and sell their products online. This included:

  • eCommerce Features: Farmers can list products, manage orders, and offer shipping or pickup options.
  • Admin Dashboard: Tools for farmers to manage their accounts, upload products, and handle sales transactions while using Stripe as a payment gateway.
  • Client Dashboard: Intuitive user interfaces for consumers to manage their orders and preferences.
  • Community Building: Features designed to help farmers grow their audience, increase awareness of local products, and build a community.

Technologies

AI-Powered Development

 

AI played a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency and quality of the platform’s development. Key contributions include:

Requirements and Business Analysis

  • ChatGPT 4: Reduced the time for validating acceptance criteria by 50%, proofreading user stories by 50%, brainstorming use cases by 50%, and improving user story formats by 83%.
  • Roadmap and Epic Definitions: Cut down time by over 80% in defining the epics needed to launch the product while ensuring consistency among different stories and features that were connected to these epics, avoiding mistakes during the development phase.

Design Phase

  • DALL-E: Created product images and logos, eliminating image search time and the costs related to that.
  • ChatGPT 4: Generated realistic text content for mockups, reducing reliance on placeholder text.

Development Phase

  • ChatGPT 4: Decreased development time for utility functions by over 80% and TailwindCSS classes by 80%.
  • AWS Configuration: Streamlined the creation of AWS S3 buckets and other configurations, saving 75% of the usual time.
  • Documentation Generation: Created comprehensive documentation, reducing time by 87.5% and ensuring business continuity after the product is delivered.
  • DevOps: Solved complex DevOps issues efficiently, cutting resolution time by 75%.

 

Delivery Phase

  • ChatGPT 4: Assisted in creating accurate and complex sales tax configurations for the platform, reducing effort from 32 hours to 8 hours and allowing eCommerce to be compliant in all states of the U.S.
  • Research and Documentation: Streamlined the process of researching and documenting tool pricing, ensuring the best fit for the platform and saving substantial time.
  • Content Creation: Facilitated the creation of placeholder and template content for landing pages, significantly speeding up the content development process.

Client

 

This agricultural eCommerce business was founded in response to the challenges faced by farmers and artisans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Witnessing the closure of local markets, the company’s mission is to support these individuals by providing an online marketplace where they can thrive. Dedicated to fostering a vibrant community, the platform enables local producers to reach a wider audience and grow their businesses beyond geographic limitations.

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