A Study on Agro-Food E-Marketing Framework in China

Agro-food Marketing is a complex task involving various stack-holders, products and business scenarios. In a developing country like china, this activity is influenced by local, socio-economic and cultural characteristics. While other complex but well-defined business processes are experiencing benefits of services driven e-business; 'marketing of agro-food' has remained untouched by this revolution. Unavailability of proper underlying IT infrastructure will continue to inhibit the implementation and penetration of such technological advancements amongst the users. In absence of such capability, the informal transactions provide meager benefits to a farmer who looses a better price in other potential market, or a wholesaler, who might have got the desired quality product at a lower cost directly from the farm. There is a need to develop affordable and reliable solution that links all the actors involved in the system and provide an environment for a competitive business. This research paper demonstrates Agro-food E- Marketing Framework, developed to aid marketing of agro-food. With the help of the Agro-food E-Marketing Framework, a trader can execute a complete trading business process. This paper also demonstrates a complete business process that is initiated by a farmer with a mobile PDA involving trade of an agro-food in the market place. buyers and sellers perspectives, conventional markets are not flexible enough to provide business of choice. (2) provides effective case study explaining how a traveler can select services from a large pool of options to integrate appropriate business functions in planning a travel. It typically reveals the concept of integrating Business Processes to achieve a desired functionality. A business process typically involves user preference collection, product suggestion, price negotiation, trade agreement, authentication, fee calculation and collection, transaction management and other required tasks. Coming back to agriculture marketing scenario, if agriculture markets also follow standard business conventions all over the nation, then agro-food marketing can also be covered in integrated business services. Web Service Orchestration is an active area of research, involving the efforts to improve Web Services composition for business quality performance, quality of service and security in business services. Our objective is to test these technological advancements in a fairly complex, real life problem. This paper argues that if existing penetration of mobile communication amongst the farmers is harnessed properly, they also can be covered in the process of successful implementation of e-business. This paper proposes an effective Agro-food E-Marketing Framework to realize the expected outcomes.