Overview

Overview

In the era of digital with growing no of mobile users daily, there are not many platforms available to get the local services. For example, things like groceries or food or medicine we have to visit the store and buy. Now imagine having an app where you can find all neighbor shops and order whatever you want and get it delivered at your doorstep. It’s just a matter of clicks you can go through various local stores like grocery shops, medical shops, restaurants, and buy things. The above cases led us to the creation of “NeedsMart”, an online platform that lets the customer explore and buys things from the nearest shops, etc, at the same time it provides visibility for the merchants to bring their shop online and provide offers which help to strengthen the business.

Features

Features

NeedsMart is a combination of three apps which are customer app, partner app, admin app. These are primary features of the application for different apps

Customer App:

- Multiple Categories (Groceries, Food, medicine, etc)

- Select Outlet and Items

- Review and Place Order

- Get Order updates and Delivery info

Partner App:

- Manage Orders

- Manage Outlet Items

- Enable/Disable Services based on availability

Admin App:

- Onboard/Manage multiple stores

- Manage Items

- Manage categories and location

Problem

Problem

In the world of digital nowadays everyone uses smartphones from small towns to metro cities. But do people living in town get the same benefits as opposed to people living in metro cities?

Have you ever thought of ordering foods, groceries in from outlets in your town but could not find any platform that provides the services.

And Not many platform are available for the local owners to onboard their shop online? Well, NeedsMart is here to cover you!. Yes through the NeedsMart android app you can order groceries, medicine, foods from the shops available near your location.

Solution

Solution

With the help of digital technologies, we came up with an idea to build a single platform which connects customer and shops in a place to engage.

Through this platform customer, the customer can order food items, groceries, medicine at nearby shops available and the shop owners can bring their shop online.

Design

Design

After analyzing the product type, features, target audience we created a basic sketch of user flow to check the overview of the application. Once we got the basic understanding of the application flow we created the wireframe. Based on the theme and nature of the application we choose the colors and designed individual components to match it with the wireframe.

After combining the colored version of the application components version with wireframe we finalized the polished UI which to be developed.

Development

Development

We have split the entire development process into five steps

Stack

For building the mobile experience for customer we have chosen react native and flutter. The main reason behind this is that we wanted to launch the product asap so that we can get user feedback, expectation to use it for further iteration. React native provides cross-platform, faster development, native APIs, the single code base for both IOS and Android, lesser development cost, which comes as open-source with the larger community. These are the factors that make react native suitable for NeedsMart. When we have built the customer app in react native we chose flutter for building the partner application. Since flutter is more matured.

Architecture

A well-defined architecture is important for any project where the team consists of many developers, as no of features grows over time, to keep the code in order and scalable, to maintain it in the long run without any mess.

NeedsMart admin app follows flutter provider architecture for managing data flow and widget states. The application code base has 3 modules which are UI, data, utils. The UI module consists of screens made of multiple widgets and providers connected to the model. The data module contains all the model and POJO classes connected to individual screens, API, and network managers. The model will be communicating with the network repository, databases, and notifies UI through change notifier. Utils module consists of themes, colors, strings, environment classes, common utility functions.

Workflow

Workflows are one of the most important parts in project development as it creates the steps to be followed to complete a feature. It gives visibility of each feature developed by its status. For NeedsMart we have split the entire project into an individual milestone, those milestones are in turn split into no of features that are to be developed.

We follow the git workflow for taking up and completing a single feature from analyzing the scope to releasing and monitoring the build.

Tools

Android Studio, Flutter, Dart SDK, Visual Studio Code, React Native, JavaScript, Fastlane, Firebase

Benefits

Benefits

1. Reduction in the time spent on visiting shops.

2. Items delivered at your doorstep.

3. During the pandemic time, you can buy things safely.

4. Increase in the customers for onboarded shops.

5. Multiple store management