Abstract— In a traditional groceries
market, various business models have been implemented. Most of these models
failed due to e-grocery retailing process. This has led to many inefficient
operation of the groceries market in many parts of the world. Previous studies
have shown the application and success of e-Groceries system in a web based
scheme. This paper tries to develop a prototype for e-Groceries system on
android platform suitable for most mobile devices. The system’s objective
includes introducing a new way of grocery shopping especially for Malaysians.
The development of the system follows the generic software development process.
Thus we provide a detailed system development and its implementation. During
implementation we call the system as MyMart e-Groceries system. Users can
select various types of groceries in a simple and friendly mobile user
interface and pay for the selected choice, which will be subsequently delivered
to their door steps. Keywords: mobile application; mini navigation; apps
inventor; android
INTRODUCTION
Online shopping provides an easier
means of purchasing product and gets them through physical delivery. Current
local online shopping in Malaysia involves both product and services. They are
mostly seen in a hotel business, flight ticket, apparel, take-out food and many
more. There are much skepticism on ordering groceries online. This has to do
with its value and price. Groceries belong to the categories of essential
commodities product. Groceries are normally found in store or it can be
described as a retail store that sells mostly food and other essential food
items. These are mostly found in a cities ranging from large grocery stores,
medium grocery stores to small groceries. The only thing that is common to them
is the food stock products that they provide with other product other than
food, such as clothing or household items. In most cases they are called
supermarkets. They mostly comprise of several stock items. Their target is to
provide the most essential product that are needed by people on day-to-day
activities. Some of this store also includes a pharmacy and an electronics
section. Other grocery stores, especially the large ones, are centerpieces of a
larger complex that includes other facilities, such as gas stations, which will
often operate under the store's name. This setup is especially common in the
United Kingdom, with major chains such as Tesco and Sainsbury's having many
locations operating under this format. The impact of intercultural competence
on reliability on service quality and customer satisfaction in grocery retail
industry in Malaysia has been discussed in Ihtiyar et al. [1]. This has to do
with dissatisfaction on face-to-face groceries retails. There are many issues
involves. Mobile device provide an opportunity of transaction between customers
and the producers. Introducing grocery shopping system on mobile platform would
make the market flexible and enhance the mobile services. A preliminary
interview performed in this study suggests that local Malaysian citizens like
groceries shopping and it was found that 69 percent of the locals go shopping
for groceries at least once a week. While the remaining 29 percent prefer to go
shopping at the markets close to their homes and very few prefer to go shopping
at malls for a more variety of goods. When it comes to groceries business, both
the customers and the business owners are cautious of their transactions, the
fact still remains considering the prices and varieties. On the other hand,
intervention promoted intentions and actual purchasing of sustainable groceries
[2]. In order to ensure the sustainability of mobile groceries business, a lot
of business standard has to be in place, because grocery business competition
arises naturally due to high travel costs and the perishable nature of
groceries appears to impart horizontal differentiation between firms [3].
Considering the issues and challenges of groceries business, this research is
aimed to tackle the groceries purchasing process. This research introduces a
mobile grocery shopping system targeting Malaysians within metropolitan Kuala
Lumpur in Malaysia in order to provide easier means of buying and selling of
groceries by Malaysians. The systems will run on mobile platform in order to
enhance the flexibility of the business. Among some previous system is the one
propose by Joo et al. [4] which is agent based system. The agents gather
grocery information from several store server agents and compare it with user's
preferences of groceries and stores. The rest of this paper is organized as
follows: section 2 provides a review of literature and background of the
related work on groceries and groceries businesses. Section 3describes the
proposed system development process in detail. It also discusses the generic
software development process and how it applies to the proposed system. Section
4 provides the result of the work, finally section 5 presents the conclusion.
ANALYSIS
AND DESIGN
A.Requirement analysis Requirement analysis
of the entire tools, features, software and hardware were undertaken at this
step. The software required for the development of the proposed system are Java
for Android application, with Eclipse IDE, Google APP inventor, and other API
libraries. For the development of the web based system, MySQL and XAMPP is
used. Additional software used for the completion of the development includes
photo and image editing tools. The major feature of the system dwells on the
benefit for both customer and retailer; the key feature is aimed at reducing
transaction time between the customers and the retailers, in terms of
purchasing groceries. This will ensure speedy business and enable customers to
have more leisure time by minimizing the time they require to shop for
groceries. This is expected to be achieved through the interface and
interaction design. B.Use case analysis Extreme programming suggests that the
development begins with planning of the project management; followed by the
planning of the design phase, which might includes the pilot testing or
simulation of the system development prior to real development and the creation
of system images and icons. The coding phase is the actual system development
where the design. Figure 1 below shows the administrator’s use case diagram.
This is normally the case when it comes to generic software development
process. The uses case of the system is intended to show the flow from
administrator to the users. The administrator uses case provide a direct
interaction with login page, viewing users personal information, updating
inventories and promotions, viewing order details and a login out page. Figure
1: Use Case diagram of administrator system Figure 2 shows is the Use Case
diagram of user or client. In this diagram the customer can register, login to
the application, view the inventory in the application, view promotion, update
information, make purchases of the product they want and clear his/his cart.
The users registered in the system, will be tracked and their can update their
personal information as time goes on. 3131
Figure 2: Use Case diagram of user
system C.Business logic analysis The business logic provides the ease at which
data flows throughout the system. This is explained in the class diagram
presented in Figure 3. The database design portrays how the database would
interact throughout the flow of request and response. When customers purchased
products, the order will be stored in the order table. Order table is related
to the order item table which consists of order id, product id and quantity.
Order and order item tables will contribute to the purchase history which is
receipt table. Product table gives the customer the information of product id,
name, price, code and category so it will be easy for them to make purchase.
There are five tables in the whole system. There are the databases used in the
application. When customers registered, the data will be saved on the customer
table. Order table contains order information from the customers. Order item
table stores data for quantity purchased by the customers. When the transaction
has been done, all the history of purchased products will be stored in the
receipt table also with the delivery date. Product table stores the information
of products in the inventory. When users log in they will use the system to
browse or purchase items. Once a purchase has been made, the system will then
forward the purchase details to the merchant. The merchant will then give out
the orders to the delivery department and the items purchased will directly
sent to the user registered address.
