From Rural Producer to Urban Markets

NTT is one of the provinces that have a good quality product on agricultural and marine, but also become one of the poorest provinces in Indonesia. The challenge is not the product quality, but the lack of human resource capacity to access national markets. We offer a professionally managed online marketing system to connect products from villages to markets in urban areas. Online marketing system manager is a organization that has the capacity to market and manage finances professionally. The buyer will order the product through the organization then the organization will convey the buyer's needs to the village producers. Village producers will prepare the product and delivered to the organization, then the organization will distributed to the buyer. With this system, we hoped that sales of village products will increase and prosper the lives of rural communities.

Many regions in NTT have quality agricultural and marine products, but the lack of human resource capacity to access existing national markets is the biggest challenge.

As a result, farmers and fishermen do not have enough financial income because they are unable to sell all of their products to the urban market. Coupled with the condition of COVID 19, which occurred in early 2020, caused a drastic decline in income due to the traditional trading system.

The inability to reach buyers in urban areas during the COVID 19 pandemic was also due to a lack of understanding related to online marketing. In fact, in a number of other areas, this method has become one of the most effective product sales strategies. In addition, internet signals are also a formidable challenge in rural areas, so they needs people or organizations that have good internet access to help them market their products in the village.

We offer a professionally managed online marketing system to connect products from villages to markets in urban areas. Online marketing system manager is a organization that has the capacity to market and manage finances professionally. It can be a cooperative or local NGO which have a experience on mange the online marketing.

The system will start with the presenting the product data by farmer/fishermen/weaver to the organization, then the organization will providing information for the buyer. After get the information, the buyer will order the product through the organization then the organization will convey the buyer's needs to the village producers. Village producers will prepare the product and delivered to the organization, then the organization will distributed to the buyer. This system will be pushed to work in group, because if they want to scale up their business its more easy to get loan from MFI if they work as a business team/groups.

The people who will be involved in this system is each individual or group business actor in the village who becomes vulnerable due to lack of access to urban markets to sell their products. Various kinds of discussions with their groups have provided information that the biggest challenge is the ability in marketing products with online system, as well as increasing access limitations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. If there is a team or oraganization that will help in marketing the product and help sales to consumers in the urban area, it will increase sales, thus the financial income of the community in the village will also increase

Many small and new businesses, do not advance because the marketing system has not kept up with current technological developments. marketing and sales are still done traditionally. Along with technological developments, online marketing is now a wise choice in business development, but rural communities are limited to accessing knowledge and skills to use the technology for marketing and sales. for this, they need the capacity building on online marketing and selling products to the urban market. If this system has been implemented, we hoped that the communities will become independent to market and sell products in creative ways.

Online marketing is a marketing strategy that is currently utilizing rapidly developing technology. It is easy in so many urban area, but this will be difficult if in the village, in a location with limited internet access. For this reason there needs to be innovation to involve second parties in conducting online promotions to connect buyers in urban areas and sellers in rural areas. 

We suggest to combine the offline network system and develop an online marketing system together to support the sale of marginalized community products in order to have a stable financial income and prosper the lives of rural communities.

On the offline network we will create the market network between the third parties with the farmer / fishermen / weaver on the villages and the other side, the online marketing system will link the second parties and the buyer.

second parties will also be responsible for training rural communities in the introduction of online marketing technologies and systems. We hope that if someday the internet network will reach rural areas, then the village community will be able to independently market and sell their products

We envision the development of technology in the form of applications that contain all products based on cluster of village products that can be selected and ordered by prospective buyers. The payment system uses online payments, so that the velocity of money occurs quickly. The application also includes ordering details in the form of prospective purchaser's personal data and the desired time for product delivery.

The second party will recap all orders and inform the seller to prepare the items ordered. After that the goods will be handed over to the second party which will then be distributed to buyers who have ordered the product and paid for the product.

Finally, When people in rural area have access to technology it increases their access to financial services and development their business

We get the idea by learn from the online marketing system in other country. In Yang village, farmers are also trying to ride the wave of online interest. Xiao, who is a Taobao “rural partner”, is responsible for helping villagers buy goods or sell their farm produce on the website’s rural platform, Cun.taobao.com, launched a year ago as part of Alibaba’s efforts to tap the huge rural market.

On other side, in Indonesia, especially in NTT (one of the poorest province in Indonesia), the online marketing system not really familiar for the business actors on the villages. That it is why we hope that if we can provide the training to increase knowledge about online marketing system and make the pilot project about the system, it will work like the other country already did