DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN E-COMMERCE SOLUTION FOR RESTAURANTS

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN E-COMMERCE SOLUTION FOR RESTAURANTS

ABSTRACT

The volume of individuals who make use of the internet today continues to grow every second and there has been a number of wonderful innovations that has come out from the use of internet in the course of history, the most prominent of them being the raise of e-commerce, a 22 trillion dollar industry, in the year 2020 alone consumers spent a whooping $861.12 buying things from U.S merchants alone and that same year the percentage of e-commerce transactions went up a by 44%. Of course, everyone would want to get a piece of this fat pie. But not everyone can do this, reason being that they either lack the technical-know-how for that or they just don’t have the resources for that. Going into the e-commerce industry today is rather expensive, they are a lot of risk and uncertainties for those who are new to it. Companies such as Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and Shopify have made an attempt to make or to assist in making it easier for any merchant to venture into the world of e-commerce.

Though efforts have been made to make e-commerce more accessible, available and affordable, there is still a shortage in some certain parts and that is the food and beverage sector. Although the food and beverage sector is one of the largest retail category in the world by a good margin, the industry has not yet widely adopted e-commerce when compared to sectors such as consumer electronics and household products. This is due to the perishable nature of food and beverage products, which typically have unique storage and logistic requirements.

It is worth noting that quick processing and delivery are critical and have traditionally been a challenge for retailers trying to take advantage of the immense e-commerce opportunity. A recent Neilsen Study found that about one-quarter of shoppers order groceries online and 55% are willing to do so in the future, right now only a few are embracing it.

With these one can conclude that there is such a shortage and extra work and more effort needs to be put into this sector.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

                1.1       Overview

The average person is never idle, he or she will be seen to be doing one thing or the other to help better themselves. After a long days work or after just completing a task nothing hits the spot like a nice meal. Food is one of those things all humans have in common. Everyone likes one type of food or the other but it’s not every time we are chanced to cook what we want to eat. This is where restaurants come to the rescue.

Restaurants provide a wide variety of foods for you to select from. However, it’s not every time one will be free to visit a restaurant, you can be stuck at work with the restaurant being across town or be too stressed to go out for dinner.

With the help of an online delivery service which is efficient and provides a convenient platform that allows one to order food from a wide array of restaurants from the comfort of our mobile devices and it gets delivered to your doorsteps, all such problems would be solved.

The society we live in has changed immensely since the introduction of the online commodity and delivery systems. This is generally known as e-commerce. From business to communication, from shopping to travelling, this method of communication has brought about easier ways of doing business and it has allowed companies promote and sell their products to a wider range of new markets by overcoming geographical borders. This has provided consumers of these products a wider range of choices when they have access to internet technologies. Mobile devices with access to internet have given companies an opportunity to reach their consumers in more diverse ways.

According to (Alquatani & Goodwin, 2012) e-commerce represents an economic movement of buying and selling goods and services through online platforms. They usually include a wide range of activities like retail stores, online payments etc. All these usually occur through three main transaction categories which includes business to business, business to customer and customer to customer (Alquatani & Goodwin, 2012).

Contained in this chapter is a brief introduction to the reader into what exactly this project entails, the reasoning behind it and what the project aims at achieving upon its conclusion.

 

                1.2       Background and Motivation

Like most E-commerce sites their main purpose is to enable their potential customers check out their products and buy them right from the comfort of their homes and through their mobile phones or laptops. Thus eliminating the person-to-person means of trade and increasing outreach for that company. The purpose of the this app is to provide a platform or a central place where restaurant owners can register to sell their products, receive payments for their sales, and gain some level of outreach, and for the customers, they won’t have to leave the comfort of their homes just to buy their next meal. The aim of this project is to simplify the whole process so that all the customer needs to do is look up what they want and place an order while the merchant receives the order, and fulfills it eliminating bottle necks such as “Uber eats” or “Jumia Food”.

While growing up, I saw a lot of people made outstanding dishes, they made all sort of delicious and mouth watering dishes, they all loved to cook and often thought of turning such talents/hobbies into an income stream. But when they did venture into selling their dishes, various problems would arise out of nowhere and thus they would be forced to shut down or suspend sells for some reason or the other and these went on for some time which consequently lessened their morale to continue work. Some of these problems were minor problems that could be solved with the right resources, strategies and policies in place; they include but not bound to the following:

1. The scarcity of a market place
2. The lack of a fitting market place
3. Dishes going to waste because they weren’t sold in time
4. Cost of delivery
5. Poor outreach
6. Insecure payment methods

 

These are all minor problems which when looked at individually are not noteworthy and have already been solved by other sources, but when looked at as a whole are very detrimental to a company especially small businesses or startups which are involved in the trade of organic perishable products and when you look at the non-perishable sector there are thriving because they have systems in place to properly aid them in the buying and selling of their products with little to no cost. This greatly saddened me and I wasn’t happy about the whole situation, thus I began to look into the whole idea of e-commerce and how it related to the food-industry and through thorough research was able to come up with an e-commerce solution for restaurants or eateries for whichever small business needed to sell their perishable goods (foods/meals) safely and make profit.

 

                1.3       Statement of the Problem

An E-commerce solution for all restaurants seems a little far fetched and at the same time a bit unnecessary. This is because to most people see the food industry as is, they don’t really see it for what it could and what it will be in the nearest future; currently if the general public is asked what a restaurants is or where can I get some food? What they’ll describe to you is a “location, to a building, where you can go in a purchase a meal or two”. Through research we can see that that, is indeed the old fashioned way of doing things, we see more and more business going online today more than ever, but the same cannot be said for the food industry. We need to find a way to better those in the food sector/industry with our technical abilities as software engineers.

Making an e-commerce solution for restaurants is a very feasible task, reason being that it has already been attempted by an growing companies such as OPAY, JUMIA FOOD and even UBER. They have set a standard, a stepping stone for others to expand upon works similar to theirs.

By embarking on the research/projects a lot will be achieved which will very much likely benefit and contribute to the countries growth some of the benefits include: job creation, reduction on the dependence of physical structures, provide a wider variety of choices for the consumer. At the same time providing solutions to problems startup restaurants face such as scarcity of a marketplace, wasted products, poor outreach, and insecure payment methods.

 

                1.4        Aim and Objectives

The Aim

The aim of this project is to develop a web application that would enable customers order meals from the comfort of their homes through the comfort of their phones. This system would have three phases which include online ordering, online billing and then order tracking. The payment can be done online through secure channels, after the customer has made an order the merchant should deliver the order within the time specified. Each meal’s billing information is gotten from the merchant, that is the merchants set their own prices for the meals they sell.

 

The following are the objectives this thesis

• Evaluate existing literature relating to e-commerce
• Analyzing the impact of e-commerce in the food industry
• Development of an e-commerce web application for ordering foods from restaurants.

                1.5       Significance of the Project

As mentioned earlier, there is currently little or no literature detailing the benefits of ecommerce in the food industry. The implementation of this project has potential to benefit the academia, the food industry, the Nigerian society and the world as a whole. This research adds more knowledge to the academia by providing hitherto unavailable statistics on the achievements, challenges, and needs of individuals who wish to sell their meals to the mass and customers who are in search of a better, easier, more efficient, comfortable and reliable way to buy meals online or in person. Also, a concise report on each phase of the implementation of the project and room for further development will be available.

 

EatLabs (The name of the web app to solve the problem) strives to make things at least a little bit more comfortable. EatLabs provides a better medium for customers and merchants to buy and sell meals respectively with ease; without needing to bother with the complexities of setting up an ecommerce site. This contributes positively to those in catering and cooking profession abstracting the complexities involved in setting up e-commerce sites, setting up a payment system to accept payment and other possible challenges. Those who will benefit the most from this projects are merchants involved in the sell of tangible good and individuals who might be too busy and won’t have the chance to begin making meals whenever they want to eat.

                1.6       Project Risks Assessment

This section defines the risks and dangers that could be encountered in the course of developing the project and the precautionary measures taken to avoid such challenges.

 

Table 1.1: Project Risk Assessment

 

RISKS                                                            PRECAUTIONS  

Inability to carry out research due to loss of hardware/software resources	Observing security trends in the campus grounds.   Observing proper security protocols.   Maintaining habits that will prolong the existence of the hardware equipment.   Regularly cleaning the device of junk and obsolete data.
Loss of work due to equipment failure /loss	Weekly backup of project to external hard drive.   Regularly saving the project report on the text editor while working on it.   An anti-virus program was purchased to avoid any form of corruption on the computer system that can lead to the loss of the work.
Software availability (Unavailability of API’s)	Alternative API’s will be checked for.  Software requirements will be identified in good time for possible contentious software’s
Deprecation of open-source packages	Regularly updating and checking for major/breaking changes with the packages being used

 

 

                1.7       Scope/Project Organization

The scope of this research involves how much businesses (restaurants) and their customers can be affected by employment of e-commerce in their daily activities . The research is focused on the e-commerce space in Nigeria. The scope would also be covering the creation of a web application that would:

• Give customers the ability to make orders comfortably from their homes.
• Receive orders in suitable time.
• Make payment for orders through safe channels.

Chapter 1 is an outline of the introduction to the project, the background of study, the problem statement, scope of work and the aims and objectives. Chapter 2 is a review of the pertinent literature. Chapter 3 discusses the research methodology which entails the design, analysis and the approach that would be taken to analyze the research. Chapter 4 deals with implementing the requirements of the application, evaluating it and testing it. Chapter 5 is the conclusion, limitation, and suggested improvements for the system.

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN E-COMMERCE SOLUTION FOR RESTAURANTS

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