See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/306099391

The Development of e-Grocery Portal; Admin Module, User Module and

Employee Module

Article  in  International Journal of Applied Engineering Research · August 2016

CITATION READS

1 3,302

3 authors, including:

Ahmad Suhaimi Baharudin Kamal Karkonasasi

Universiti Sains Malaysia University of Malaysia, Kelantan
142 PUBLICATIONS   473 CITATIONS    34 PUBLICATIONS   47 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

[C] Cloud Computing Adoption, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) View project

[I] Problem Solving Tools Adoption, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Kamal Karkonasasi on 15 August 2016.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 11, Number 15 (2016) pp 8427-8431
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
The Development of e-Grocery Portal; Admin Module, User Module and
Employee Module
Mohd Faizal Bin Md Rejab
School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), 11800, Penang, Malaysia.
Ahmad Suhaimi Baharudin
School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), 11800, Penang, Malaysia.
Kamal Karkonasasi
School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), 11800, Penang, Malaysia.
Corresponding author
Abstract
Nowadays, there have been so many advances using Internet
technology. By using the Internet technology, people can
obtain many benefits and using this technology, we develop a
system that called E-Grocery Portal. The main objective in
developing this system is to develop an e-grocery portal that is
designed especially for the grocery store so that it will aid
customers in reducing waiting time when shopping for
groceries. This is due to the problem that are faced by people
who are busy with their career and do not have time to do
grocery shopping. This system consists of three main modules
and there are Admin module, User Module and Employee
module. This paper will explain more about the User module
and how it works and how it cooperates with other two
modules. This paper also refers to technical papers that are
related to the development of this e-grocery portal.
Keywords: Component; e-grocery, customers, Internet.
INTRODUCTION
The Internet is the world’s single biggest networked
community, hundreds of thousands of networks, millions of
computers and tens of millions of people [1]. Nua Internet
Surveys estimated that there are about 407.1 million Internet
users worldwide and Zakon (2000) approximated about
93,047,785 host, 13,001,000 domains and 134,365 networks.
The Internet is still growing and will never stop growing. The
Internet nowadays becomes one of the platforms for global
commerce. In Malaysia nowadays, there are a lot of
businessmen who are using this technique or this new
platform as a way to expand their business and also to make
people know about their products thus popularize them.
One type of business that are using this kind of technique is
grocery business. Usually, grocers have their own store and
they only manage their store only for people who live in their
area not more than two to three kilometers. People who want
to get the grocery items will need to go to the grocery store or
market to do the grocery shopping. As we all know, grocery is
a very important item for every household, but nowadays,
most people are becoming too busy to go to the grocery store
to buy grocery stuff. This kind of problem includes the
8427
woman who has their own career and also includes
housewives.
Housewives usually do not have time to buy groceries because
they are preoccupied with keeping the children and do the
cooking. In addition, they also sometimes need to send and
retrieve the child from school. In other words, they don’t have
much time to do grocery shopping because it takes so much
time. This thing can happen if they stuck in the traffic jam
while going or back from the grocery store. Besides that, they
also need to line up to pay for the grocery items.
The other problems that are also can occur when doing the
grocery shopping in usual way are consumer do not know
about the item's availability in the grocery store. They will
just go into a condition where they are just assuming that the
items are available. The next problem that is being taken into
consideration is the location of the grocery store. Sometimes,
a grocery store is situated quite far from residential area which
also will make consumers take a long time to get there and do
the grocery shopping.
To overcome this problem, we propose a system for consumer
to buy grocery items online. People can do their grocery
shopping by just a few clicks using the system. This system is
called e-Grocery Portal.
First of all, what is e-grocery? E-grocery is a combination of
the world's e-commerce and grocery. In line with the
organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) definition of e-commerce, e-grocery here means
groceries shopped over the Internet [2]. This will allow people
to get the grocery items by purchasing them using the Internet.
The objective of our proposal is to facilitate and provide
comfort to people when they doing grocery shopping without
requiring a lot of time. Besides that, people can use this
system at anywhere and anytime they want. This system will
save a lot of time and it also can make people know about the
availability of grocery items. This system also will provide
delivery service to customers.
The development of this system will be using three main
modules and they are Admin Module, User Module and
Employee Module. These three modules will complete the e-
Grocery Portal.
 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 11, Number 15 (2016) pp 8427-8431
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
SYSTEM SCOPE OVERVIEW
The scope of this e-grocery system which needed to be
emphasized for the completion of the project consists of the
following criteria.
 The order can be made from two types of customers
and there are registered customers and unregistered
customer or guest, and later will be delivered to
customers house.
 The system developers will be able to differentiate
grocery, according to its type and storage
requirements to make sure the item's quality are just
like when it was taken off the shelf.
Next, the scope for using this system in certain grocery stores
is in just a small radius from the shop and just for the local
area. Usually, e-grocery is a system in which customers will
place orders on their items and have it delivered straight to
their home in a short amount of time. The delivery service can
only be provided with a small radius of the shop. This is
because of the time constraint of the item's quality.
We suggest that the scope of using this system is only about
five kilometers from the shop because the customer’s order
will be delivered by grocery store delivery persons using
motorcycle. The reason we choose this type of delivery
service because when using a motorcycle, it takes less time to
deliver the customer’s order than using other transport such as
a van. Due to item's quality, our employees or runners will use
motorcycle that has modified by adding a box that will
maintain the freshness of the goods delivered but not in the
long time. The delivery service fee or a minimum ordering
price will be charged to make sure that a company can get a
decent return in providing services for our customers.
TECHNIQUE OVERVIEW
The techniques that are considered to use while develop this
system or Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) and
Waterfall Model. These techniques are used as methodology
when developing a system or while doing programming. This
is to make sure the development of the system is well
organized.
Object Oriented Analysis and Design
Object Oriented Analysis and Design or OOAD is one of the
methodologies for high-quality object-oriented systems. This
software development methodology involved three main
aspects and there is:
 Object Oriented Analysis (OOA). It will deal with
the design requirements and overall architecture of
the system and focus on describing what the system
should do in terms of key objects in the problem
domain.
 Object Oriented Design (OOD). This will translate
system architecture into programming constructs
such as interfaces, classes, and method descriptions.
 Object Oriented Programming (OOP). It will
implement these programming constructs.
The fundamental idea behind this method is object
decomposition, breaking the complex system down into its
8428
various objects, combining the data and the functions that
operate on the data into a single unit, the object. Objects are
discussed and built by modeling real-world instances. A
typical object oriented system consists of a number of
cooperating objects, each of which may or may not
collaborate with other objects in order to achieve some task
for the user.
Real world objects display the characteristic of high cohesion,
they maintain a single theme or focus and this software
objects model real world objects. This form of object
decomposition provides a natural way of breaking the
problem down into isolated, manageable parts. In some cases,
the development effort shifts from writing a new code to
assembling existing objects in new and innovative ways to
solve a problem. Thus, OOAD methodology cuts down
development time and cost, leading to faster time to market
and significant competitive advantage and enables producing
more flexible, modifiable and easily maintainable systems.
One of the techniques that represent the system is a Unified
Modeling Language (UML). UML includes a set of graphic
notation techniques to create visual models of object oriented
system. It is used to specify, visualize, modify, construct and
document the artifacts of a system under development [3].
For this OOAD, it divided into two object oriented analysis.
There are object oriented analyses (OOA) and object oriented
design (OOD). For the object oriented analysis (OOA), we
apply an object modeling technique to analyses the functional
requirements for this system and we look at the main problem.
We analyzed model and are not considering any
implementation constraints that might exist or how this
system will be built. We need to do the analysis first before
doing for the design. Then the result of this OOA will be
described into what the system is functionally required to do
in the form of a conceptual model. This can be represented as
a set of use cases, one or more UML class diagram and a
number of interaction diagrams. It may also include user
interface mock-up.
For the object oriented design (OOD), it will elaborate the
analysis models to produce implementation specifications.
This OOD will transform the conceptual model produced in
OOA to take account of the constraints imposed by the chosen
architecture. The concept in the analysis model will be
mapped onto implementation classes and interfaces. The
result is a model of the solution domain, a detailed description
of how the system is to be built.
Waterfall Model
The waterfall model is a sequential design process and it often
used in the software or the system development process. The
waterfall model progress is seen as flowing steadily
downward like a waterfall through the phases of requirements,
design, implementation, verification and maintenance.
 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 11, Number 15 (2016) pp 8427-8431
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
Figure 1: Progress flows from the top to the bottom
The waterfall development model which is shown in Figure 1
originates in the manufacturing and construction industries. It
is highly structured physical environments in which after the
fact changes are prohibitively costly. Because of that time
there are no software development methodologies existed, this
model was simply adapted for software development.
In the Waterfall model, after each phase is finished, it will
proceed to the next phase. The review may occur before
moving to the next phase, which allows for the possibility of
changes. Reviews may also be employed to ensure that the
phase is indeed complete. The phase completion criteria are
often referred to as a “gate” that the project must pass through
to move to the next phase. Waterfall model discourages
revisiting and revising any prior phase once it is complete.
CHOSEN TECHNIQUE
For this development of e-grocery system, we decide to use
the Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) as our
development methodology and illustrated in Figure 2. This is
because for us this technique is the best choice for our project
as it is the most appropriate methodology for our
programming language in this project which is PHP [4]. The
use case of our e-grocery system is shown below.
Figure 2: Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD)
8429
The e-grocery consists of three main modules and there are
Admin module, User module and Employee module. Each
module has their unique function and it will help and make an
easy to use by the user of this system.
ADMIN MODULE
An admin module in this system will make sure that the user
that is acting as an admin of the system can cooperate and
easier to manage.
This admin module also will make grocer who is using this
system can easily manage their product such as adding
product, edit the product price, create new catalogs and
category, viewing customers order, passing customers order to
the employee module and also can keep track with business
flow.
There are two system management that admin will control.
First, the product management system and second, purchase
management system. For the product management system,
admin can edit all the product details and also can add a new
category and add new catalog.
For the purchase, management system, admin can view all the
purchasing process that is made by the customers and admin
also will take action when customers made an order by
viewing the order in here.
Besides that, this module also will cooperate with the other
two modules to complete the system. It will get some
parameter from the user module and pass it to the employee
module.
USER MODULE
For the user module, it will make this system more user
friendly because almost 100% of this module will be
interacting with users. In this system, there will be two types
of user. The first type is users who act just a guest to this
system. They do not register with the system and the system
doesn’t have their information. This type of user only can
view all product and purchase product but they will be asked
to enter information required to make the delivery process.
The payment will be done when the products arrive at their
house [5].
The second type of this module is registered users. Users who
are already registered with this system can log in and view
products, purchase product, leave comments or feedback,
tracking their history transaction and make reservation order.
Besides that, this type of users also can make payment using
g-credit or use another type of payment such as a credit card
[6].
G-credit is one way to make payment and user only need to
pay first in a certain amount and it will be deducted from this
user account credit when they purchase some products in the
system. This registered users did not need to enter information
each time they make the online shopping because the system
has already had their information while doing the user
registration.
For the graphic user interface as shown in Figure 3, we decide
to make this system consist of the product image in the main
page and user can view the products that are available just by
 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 11, Number 15 (2016) pp 8427-8431
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com
click on one of the product images that are acting as a catalog
button. The draft of our system is shown below.
Figure 3: Graphical User Interface
When users click on the product images that are acting as a
catalog button, the details of each product that are available
will be shown. The product detail will be shown in a table
form. The draft of this action is shown below.
Figure 4: Table of cart
In the table shown in Figure 4, there will be a picture of the
product, the price of the product for each kilogram, a text field
for user to enter how much kilogram they want to purchase,
the total price and an add product to cart button.
8430
Figure 5: Shopping Cart
When user click on the add cart button, the product will be
added in the list of products that are user purchase in the
shopping cart as stated in Figure 5. Also, in the shopping cart,
user can remove the product and it will be removed when user
click on the remove button that are also in the shopping cart
page.
The shopping cart will show how many product that user have
added, the total price and when the user already finish
shopping, they need to click the checkout button and can
make their payment by choosing the way they want to pay
either using G-credit, or credit card.
After making the payment, admin will be informed about the
order and admin will take action by informing the employee.
EMPLOYEE MODULE
The main user of the Employee module is the employee/staff
from the enterprises. The main function of the Employee
module is to manage the orders made by the customers. With
this module, the employee/staff can view the orders that have
been made by customers. All the orders made by the
customers have a unique order ID and the employee/staff can
view them based on the order ID. Orders made by customers
will provide the employee/staff with the information involving
the purchases; product details, product prices, quantities,
ordering products, total price for products, total price for the
orders, payment methods used by the customers and the
customer’s contact details. The information from the orders
will be used by the employee/staff to make the delivery of the
purchased products to the customers. Then after viewing the
orders, the employee/staff can update the status of the order.
The purpose of updating the order status is to notify the
system that the employee has already received the orders
made by the customers.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The development of this e-grocery portal will make the people
who really want to save time while doing the grocery
shopping is much easier and also can do it fast. This e-grocery
 International Journal of Applied Engineering Research ISSN 0973-4562 Volume 11, Number 15 (2016) pp 8427-8431
© Research India Publications. http://www.ripublication.com

portal also can be used anywhere if there is an Internet

connection. By purchasing the grocery items through this
system, they do not need to go to the grocery store to do the
grocery shopping and do not need to queue to make payment.
The technique that we choose to develop this system, OOAD
is the best choice because this technique will produce a
system that is more flexible, modifiable and easily
maintainable systems.
For the conclusion, for us, this e-grocery system is one of the
convenient ways for the customers because ask, we know
nowadays, mostly every household have internet and just by
using the Internet connection, customers can purchase grocery
items and the grocery items will deliver straight to their home
by the store’s delivery person.
By using this e-grocery system, it will make a hassle-free
shopping and for the future work, this portal can be expanded
not only used for the grocery items but also for other product
such as hardware product, clothes or gift store. But the system
will be needed to be improved to make sure that it will give
the best service.
Besides that, the portal also can be added any advertisement
or promotion about some product that can attract the user to
buy and also can put news updates or future event about the
store activity. For example, if the sore will have some joint
venture with other store, the news can be shown there.
The other things that can be added in the portal are visitor
counter and link to the other important website or online shop
such as eBay or Amazon.com.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to acknowledge Universiti Sains
Malaysia (USM) as this research has been supported from the
Short Term Research Grant [Account Number:
304/PKOMP/6312103] and from the Research University
Grant (RUI) [Account Number: 1001/PKOMP/811251] from
the Universiti Sains Malaysia.

REFERENCES

[1]. Malik. B.A, “E-Grocery System Design for Shopping

Malls,” Faculty Of Information Technology And
Quantitative Science, Universiti Teknologi MARA,
April 2006.
[2]. Karlsson, E. and P.Resén, “A Reality Check on E-
grocery Delivery Options-Experiences from the
Swedish Market,” 2004.
[3]. Ghazali E., Mutum D., Mahbob, N. A., “Exploratoty
Study of buying fish online : are Malaysian ready to
adopt online grocery shopping?,” Faculty of Business
and Accountancy, University Malaya, Kuala
Lumpur, 2006.
[4]. http://www.khas.com.my,
[5]. https://www.virgrocery.com
[6]. http://www.doorstep.com.my/

8431

View publication stats