BRIDGING MARKET GAPS: A WEB-BASED E-COMMERCE SYSTEM FOR EMPOWERING SMALLHOLDER FARMERS IN NIGERIA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33003/fjs-2026-1008-5267Keywords:
Agricultural E-Commerce, Farm Product Marketing, Digital Marketplace, PHP/Mysql Web System, Smallholder Farmers, Supply Chain Disintermediation, NigeriaAbstract
The agricultural sector is a cornerstone of economic development in many developing nations, yet smallholder farmers persistently struggle with limited market access, over-reliance on exploitative intermediaries, price opacity, and significant post-harvest losses. This paper presents the design and full-stack implementation of Farm Connect, a web-based Farm Product Marketing System developed to bridge the gap between rural farmers and urban buyers in Ibadan, Nigeria. The system adopts a three-tier client-server architecture built on HTML, CSS, JavaScript (React.js), PHP, and MySQL, deployed on a cloud-hosted environment. Following the Waterfall software development lifecycle, the platform delivers role-based dashboards for farmers, buyers, and administrators; real-time product listing with image upload; cart and order management; bank-transfer evidence verification; order-status tracking; and multi-layer security (CSRF tokens, prepared statements, file-type validation, and bcrypt password hashing). System testing spanning unit, integration, system, user-acceptance, security, and cross-browser evaluation confirmed functional completeness and usability. Evaluation results demonstrate measurable improvements in market visibility for farmers, reduced transaction costs, and transparent pricing. The study concludes with recommendations for mobile-app extension, logistics API integration, multilingual support, and a sustainable transactional fee model to ensure platform longevity.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Temitope Anifowose, Samuel Abiola, Aishat Ajibola Oyelabi, Oluwaseun Oluwasetemi Oyediran, Peter Oluwapelumi Adegbite
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