Reinforcing Small-Scale Producers via Innovative Business Models: a Case of Natural Food and Drinks Products in Serbia

Abstract

Modern e-business ecosystems imply a plethora of relations, processes, roles and technical solutions. This creates a lot of complexity to small businesses and force them to redefine business models. This paper portrays an ecommerce ecosystem that includes all the processes from field to the customers’ homes where web store plays the main role. The idea is to enhance small producer’s business employing digital channels, such as: web site, social networks, messaging apps, Google, email and others. The B2C web portal “Natural tastes (Ukusi prirode in Serbian)” implements aggregator model and enables listing of the products, buying, and promotion of the natural products from different small-scale producers. In addition, the portal provides several common services, such as: product rating, comments, social network sharing, chatbot, wish list, newsletter subscription, etc. The same corpus of products can be ordered via additional digital channels. Accordingly, the portal provides an offering that has uniform quality and price, even though it is offered by different partner providers. Further, the model tries to resolve the biggest issue small businesses have, not only in our region, but worldwide – delivery. After initial analysis, we came to conclusion that key problem they are dealing with is how to deliver the products to customers, considering the fact that they produce natural food and drinks. At the moment, due to not having time and money to do it on their own, small producers mainly uses delivery companies. However, this solution doesn’t take specifics of their products into account: sensitive packaging, temperature, fast delivery, the places were products have to be picked up, prices, etc. The situation with Covid-19 further fueled the need to improve this part of the business and made huge pressure on delivery service companies. We established particular delivery services for the products from web store. In addition, the model is flexible in the way that the producers can sell their products using their own channels, but can choose the products to be delivered via Natural tastes delivery service. Warehousing the products is another issue as well. As the majority of the clients are from big cities, while the production is far away in mountains or fields, storing products and whole process is extremely challenging. In this way the small producers can entirely focus on what they are best in – production, while the parts they are not familiar with by default, can be outsourced to the partner on digital channels. On the other hand the model establishes trust with consumers and provide easy access, cost-effectiveness, and time-saving services. Finally, we try to foster social responsibility and make a strong impact on the healthy food and life. Only fully natural and healthy products could be the part of the ecosystem.