GO GREEN ONLINE NURSERY AND PLANT MARKETPLACE

Abstract

Plant nurseries constitute a foundational segment of the horticultural and agricultural supply chain, yet the majority of small-to-medium nursery enterprises continue to rely on paper-based or fragmented digital records for their daily operations. This paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of a web-based Nursery Management System (NMS) built to centralise and automate key operational workflows including plant inventory management, customer relationship management, order processing, billing, supplier coordination, and staff scheduling. The system was engineered using a three-tier architecture comprising a React.js front-end, a Node.js/Express.js middleware layer, and a MySQL relational database backend. Role-based access control differentiates the privileges of administrators, sales staff, and procurement personnel. Functional testing, usability assessment, and a two-month pilot deployment at a regional nursery enterprise in Tamil Nadu, India, yielded a 41% reduction in order-fulfilment time, a 35% decrease in inventory discrepancies, and an overall user satisfaction score of 4.3 out of 5.0 on a standardized usability questionnaire. The findings confirm that a well-structured, domain-specific information system can substantially raise operational efficiency and data integrity in nursery enterprises without incurring prohibitive implementation costs.