ZEVA: A Web-Based Farmer-to-Consumer Marketplace for Direct Fresh Crop Commerce

Abstract

ZEVA is a web-based agricultural commerce concept designed to shorten the distance between crop producers and end consumers. The public project interface describes the service as a platform for buying fresh crops directly from farmers. This paper develops that concept into a structured digital marketplace architecture in which farmers can present available produce while consumers can discover, evaluate, and request fresh agricultural products through a single online channel.

The central research contribution is a farmer-to-consumer interaction model that treats produce availability, source visibility, freshness information, order intent, and transaction traceability as connected information rather than isolated shopping functions. The paper proposes a modular architecture containing identity and role management, farmer produce publishing, consumer discovery, cart and order processing, availability-aware inventory, transaction records, and an administrative oversight layer. A distinctive feature of the proposed model is the introduction of a freshness-aware commerce perspective: agricultural products are time-sensitive assets, so the marketplace should represent availability and harvest context instead of treating every product as a static catalogue item. The study also defines a measurable evaluation framework covering usability, response time, order accuracy, information completeness, transaction transparency, and farmer-side accessibility. The work is presented as a system design and research framework; implementation-specific technologies and numerical performance claims are not asserted where they cannot be verified from the publicly accessible project interface.