The New Online Agricultural Marketplace - Fair Trade Made Easy

By Author: Jagat Singhal
Total Articles: 1
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The eCommerce revolution, which started from selling pizzas, beauty, cosmetics, and lifestyle products, and electronic items, has now gone agriculture. The last bastion of the traditional lifestyle, the rural economy, has turned digital.

The online Agricultural marketplace is a digital platform – a B2B model which brings the Farmers and industrial buyers together.
It is a business-to-business platform that ensures intermediaries are eliminated, resulting in faster, easy, and transparent food trading.

The online agriculture marketplace is not just about buying and selling. It also offers end-to-end logistic services apart from ensuring quality control of food products. Payments are also secured as made online.

Agricultural Digital platforms are powered by entrepreneurs, start-ups groups, and hence turned out to be a new phenomenon in India. This is the scenario even though India has always been an agricultural country, with 80% of its population's primary source of livelihood has been agriculture and allied activities.

Transactions on the digital platform allow farmers to sell their farm ...
... products to the best bidders effortlessly. It generates transparent opportunities for whole sellers or even retailers, including the flexibility of getting farm products without being dependent on various intermediaries in the supply chain.

Key benefits of an online agriculture marketplace

1. A user-friendly digital platform that anybody can access
2. Unlimited access to different markets without geographical boundaries.
3. An integrated and secured platform for transactions
4. Quality certification and value-added logistics services
5. Marketplace for verified buyers and sellers
6. Crop reliability through tracing of supply chain route
7. Customer support
Online marketplace for farm products is beneficial for farmers and consumers as the middleman exploitation gets eliminated. Middlemen intermediaries offer a lower price to farmers for their farm produce and charge higher prices from consumers. It results in higher transaction costs and lower returns to farmers. The online platform does away with this practice. Farmers get far better prices, and still, it works out cheaper for the consumers in the regulated B2B market.

How does it work?
• Buyers and sellers have to sign up and register on an online marketplace
• Sellers post the details of their products. The characteristics of the crops, attributes.
• Quantity of the crops on offer and the price is shared on the platform
• Commercial terms and conditions are shared
• Details of logistics and the quality check services
• Updations by emails/mobiles or notifications from the platform.
• Online platforms have the required checks and balances regarding the registered buyers and verified sellers.
• A buyer can also post their requirement on the platform, which can get a response from farmers or sellers.

The takeaway
Online Agri marketplace not only facilitates the process of buying and selling but also provides many other value-added services for the customers. Products like fertilizers, pesticides, and seeds are also available on this platform which is beneficial to farmers. Buying and selling of lands are facilitated here, which gives opportunities to more new investors or existing farmers wanting to expand their farming business.