FARMLINK: A digital Agri-Tech Marketplace Connecting Pakistani Farmers Directly to Customers

Abstract

First and foremost, FarmLink stands out as a web-based marketplace solution for the well-known inefficiency in the agricultural market of Pakistan: the unjustified gap between those producing food and consumers buying food. The traditional supply chain through mandi leads to farmers being underpaid, consumers being overcharged, and a lot of food going to waste because of slow and poorly-coordinated process. FarmLink cuts out these intermediaries and gives a transparent digital route. As a result, users will be able to look through their fresh products, determine their source farms and buy products through WhatsApp – the leading messaging app in Pakistan. Technically, FarmLink is developed with Node.js and Express, uses MongoDB Atlas database, and has very minimalistic front-end built with only plain HTML, CSS, and JS to be able to run even on the most primitive devices and in low-connectivity areas. The design is focused on maximum accessibility. The product offers customer storefront with search, filtering and sorting, freshness tracker calculating "freshness score" based on harvest date and displaying it with a colored bar, admin dashboard for managing stocks and orders with CSV export feature, and profile pages for farmers. The first batch includes ten authentic products from Pakistan – from veggies and fruits to dairy and grains at realistic prices in 2026 PKR. The project is deployed to Railway, linked with MongoDB Atlas. Production performance is steady. Testing done on both Windows and macOS shows good cross platform compatibility in terms of all browsers and form factors. Simulated pricing analysis hints at potential cost reduction of 15–30% for consumers on essential products and additional profit for farmers per kg. Overall, FarmLink isn't just another application; it proves that a simple user-oriented web-based platform accounting for peculiarities of rural Pakistan can contribute to redistribution of profit.