Farmland Venture

Farmland Venture Ltd farms, processes and sells fish: blast-frozen, IQF and ready-to-cook packs, from a 99-taka "Bachelor Pack" to premium large fish, with their own contract farming and a full cold chain behind it.

Selling online was only part of what they needed. Behind the shop sits a factory that buys fish from suppliers, processes it, loses weight along the way, sends stock to Dhaka, sells to dealers and resellers as well as to customers, pays employees and reports to investors. None of that fits in an off-the-shelf store, and none of it can run on paper once the volume grows.

They wanted one system for all of it: a website customers can buy from, apps the team can run the business from, and payments that go straight to the company's bank accounts.

We built one platform with four faces on a single PHP API and MySQL database.

The website

farmlandventure.com: a custom e-commerce site with product categories, bundles, reviews, wishlist, cart, checkout, order tracking, blog, landing pages and the policy pages a bank gateway asks for. Three manager panels run products, bundles, blog posts, suppliers and purchase invoices.

Payments go bank-direct: bKash and Nagad for mobile money, and card payments through Eastern Bank, Southeast Bank, BRAC Bank, City Bank and Trust Bank gateways, plus cash on delivery. We handled the merchant onboarding with the banks, including the proof-of-delivery documentation they require, so the money lands in Farmland's own accounts with no aggregator in between.

Three Android apps

• Farmland Venture, for customers: browse categories, product pages, favourites, cart, checkout and order history.
• FV Trade Price, for dealers and the sales team: the current price list by package, a purchase-order generator that produces a PDF, order editing, sales invoices and returns, behind a PIN lock.
• FV Admin, the back office: 131 screens covering the factory (purchased fish, processed fish, processing cost, off-grade sales, damage, returns, weight loss and gain, stock per factory and transfers to Dhaka stock), purchasing (suppliers, purchase invoices, payments), sales (sales invoices and returns, dealers, resellers, buyers, couriers, an online-sales dashboard and order editing with PDF invoices), accounting (accounts, cash in, balance transfers, payments received and sent, transactions, expense categories, profit reports), HR (employees, attendance, salary) and investors and shareholders. Reports export to PDF and Excel, and live stock updates arrive in real time.

Under the hood

The apps are native Android in Java, talking to the API with Retrofit; PDF invoices and reports are generated on the phone with iText, and Pusher pushes live updates to the admin app. The website and API are plain PHP on MySQL, which keeps hosting cheap and anyone on the team able to maintain it.

The platform has been in daily use since early 2024 and has kept growing with the business: the website went from a store to a company site with landing pages and bundles, and FV Admin reached version 3.1 with a new module for almost every part of the operation. Customers order online, dealers raise purchase orders from their phones, and the factory, stock, sales and accounts are all in one place the owners can see from anywhere.