An Aggregator Model of Business - Assignment Example

C2C fashion is popularly called an Aggregator Model of business. The idea is simple, it will aggregate all suppliers of sweets including cupcakes, pastries, party cakes, tarts, candies among others including big and small retailers around the world, and help them sell to a vast array of customers near them. The website will carry a huge collection of all things sweets and would allow rapid delivery of sweets at the customer’s place whether it is a home, a workplace, or an event place, or a communal gathering. Upon launching the website, the website would learn the location of the customer, and then based on that the customers would be able to choose different kinds of sweets that are provided by shops within their area and carry that product in stock at that very moment. These sweets are deliverable in less than an hour. This ensures that the sweets that are delivered to the customer are always the freshest, without any element of degradation. The mode of payment would be through a variety of means suitable to the customer including Credit / Debit cards, Bank transfers, e-Wallets, Mobile Payments, and even cash. Each of the purchases earns the customer a point that is redeemable after accumulating a certain amount of points.
Innovativeness

There are hundreds of sweet shops in any given alley at any point in time across many cities of the world. This is simply because customers love sweets. The industry is sub-segmented into Bread, Rolls, Frozen Cakes, Fresh Cakes, Pies, Candies, and Retail Bakery Products. There is a lot to offer at any given time. At the same time, these products get buried in a typical food delivery website as they are considered ‘desserts’ and shown to customers at the very end or at the most in an ‘add-on’. The unique idea here is to give this industry the proper exposure it deserves whereas give sweet lovers hundreds of options to satiate their sweet tooth at any given time. 
Business model

The business model of this venture would be C2C. This means that, for the business, at both ends of the pole there is a customer. 

The advantage here is that their earnings at both ends of the spectrum, meaning that the business earns from both the providers as well as the customers. The entire business is based on an aggregator marketplace model that runs entirely on its own with the bulk of the business being involved with providing these people the right set of ICT infrastructure to make the trade happen.

Tools and libraries

The website had been prepared using a pre-built template. The template uses various CSS files that are responsible for making it responsive. For styling the website, the code is present in the default.css file. The site also uses a pre-loader feature. This is coded through both JS and CSS code. Currently, the contact form is static but it can be made interactive using Php code and contactform.js.
Work division

The project had been divided as mentioned below:

Team member

Responsibility

<Name 1>

Searching for a pre-built HTML5 template took around 3 days. As most of the good templates were paid so we need to settle on the chosen template.

<Name 2>

Php coding on dynamic pages such as adding items to the cart, display cart, check out, etc.

<Name 3>

Set-up environment to run the code. Prepare MySQL database and prepared scripts.

<Name 4>

Php code integration with the database. Unit testing.

Being from a non-IT background, firstly I had to learn HTML and JavaScript. I had to learn the basics of PHP language as well. JavaScript was used to conduct client-side validation. The server-side and database validation was conducted using Php code. The main issue, I faced was setting up the deployment environment. I managed to install XAMPP but then connectivity with database and code took us quite a login which is still a struggling issue.