A start-up under the Central Institute of Fisheries Technology (CIFT) has developed e-trading platforms as part of digitally transforming the fisheries supply chain in its bid to introduce online auction in the Indian fisheries sector.

The objective of the project — developed by Resinov Blue, the start-up under the Foundation for Environmental Research & Innovation (FERI) — is to empower and modernise the conventional supply chain and physical auction of fish with digital technologies.

It has developed two platforms for integration of local fish shops to the online portal and an online fish auction platform for the digital transformation of national fisheries supply chain. The stock quality checks will be performed in the supply chain through standard protocols.

Stakeholders

Leela Edwin, Director, CIFT, said the auction platform — onlinefishtrade.com — would be an alternative to the physical auctions. Fish farmers, fishermen, boat owners, auctioneers, wholesalers and retailers can be the stakeholders.

Four types of auctions

As many as four types of auctions are integrated in the platform. Incremental, reserved and automatic mode of auctions are made available for the sellers, whereas reverse auction feature is provided exclusively for the buyers to get competitive bids from multiple sellers for bulk orders. The auction duration could be set to several minutes, hours or days.

The e-commerce website developed for fish retailers enables regional shops to have their online presence near the customer’s location.

The website makes use of the O2O (online to offline) commerce concept where in online customers would be able to make purchase through nearby physical fish shops with options for home delivery of cleaned fishes. The retailers could avail their stocks through the developed online auction platform.

She pointed out that the digital intervention is expected to facilitate more freedom of sales, responsible sourcing and quality checks in the fisheries supply chain.

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