Industry overview
What is shaping agriculture
Agriculture supports a large share of rural livelihoods, and its buying decisions are made close to the soil: at the village dealer, the cooperative and the neighbouring lead farmer. Seasonality, weather and credit shape almost every choice a farmer makes.
- Purchase decisions cluster in short pre-sowing windows
- Trusted dealers and lead farmers carry more weight than advertising
- Digital payments, agri-fintech and crop insurance are changing how farmers buy
Client background
An agri-input distributor, working in Gujarat. Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.
- Organisation
- An agri-input distributor
- Sector
- Agriculture
- Team engaged
- IT & Development
- Services
- Mobile app development, API development & integration, Software testing & QA
Client challenge
Dealers placed orders by phone or in paper books collected by sales staff. Orders were lost, credit limits were checked by hand and stock disputes were common. The distributor wanted a simple digital channel that would work in villages with weak connectivity.
Research objectives
- Deliver on the brief: replacing paper order books with a dealer ordering app.
- Design around the real needs of rural dealers.
- Define requirements and success criteria the solution would be tested against.
- Deliver a reliable, secure solution the team can run and extend.
Target audience
The work focused on 600 rural dealers.
- rural dealers600
Audiences we typically reach in agriculture
Farmers and growersAgri-input dealersCooperatives and FPOsAgronomists and extension workersAgri-fintech users
Geographic coverage
Coverage: Gujarat. Market: India.
- India
Research methodology
An iterative delivery approach: discovery, design, build and test in short cycles, with the client reviewing each step.
- 1Brief
- 2User interviews with dealers
- 3Offline-first app
- 4ERP integration
- 5Insight
We interviewed dealers at their shops to understand how they ordered and what confused them. The resulting app was built offline-first, in Gujarati and English, with large buttons and a familiar product list. Orders synchronised when a signal returned and flowed straight into the distributor’s accounting system, which checked credit limits automatically.
Mobile app developmentAPI development & integrationSoftware testing & QA
Sampling strategy
- rural dealers
- 600
- Users and stakeholders from every affected team took part in discovery workshops and acceptance testing.
Data collection
- Requirements were gathered through workshops, process walk-throughs and a review of existing systems and data.
Data quality & validation
- Peer code review on every change
- Automated and manual testing
- User-acceptance testing with the client
- Release checklist and rollback plan
Data analysis
- Usage and performance monitoring after launch
- Defect and support-ticket trends
- Process time before and after
Key findings
- Most dealers adopted the app within the first season with help from sales staff.
Designing for the dealer’s shop counter, not a city office, made the difference to adoption.
Recommendations
- The distributor later added scheme announcements and payment reminders.
- Track adoption and support tickets, and plan the next release from real usage.
What we recommended, and the client put into practice
Business impact
- Order disputes fell noticeably, and the sales team spent more time advising dealers instead of writing orders.
Deliverables & next steps
- Deployed solution with documentation and handover
- Support and maintenance plan
- Repeat the measure after changes are in place to track progress.
- A natural follow-on question: which channels reach farmers before sowing?
Client identity is withheld to protect confidentiality.