Walk Hand in Hand with Bukalapak: Actualizing Indonesia’s Economic Equality Goals
“There are 56 million SMEs in our country, it’s a very huge number. Mr Zaky said there are 4 million Pelapak in Bukalapak as of 2018. That’s a quite enormous number, but if it has to be compared to 56 million, Bukalapak still has a lot of work to do to cover the remaining 52 million. This is also a responsibility of the government including the Ministers to get the remaining SMEs integrated with Bukalapak.” said The President of Indonesia, Joko Widodo, on his speech at Bukalapak 9th Anniversary event.
Here, Indonesia is aiming with optimism to become the world’s next economic and technology giant. One of the strategies is to implement all the aspects that can consistently prioritize stability of the economic and technology sector. As one of the technology company in Indonesia, we want to take a part in achieving the goals of Indonesia. We implemented several efforts including the campaign and technology improvement to reach our purpose. The two main focus is to improve trust and ease of use experienced by sellers and local kiosk (known as warung). At Bukalapak, we call the sellers as Pelapak, while for the local kiosk, we call them as Mitra Bukalapak.
We strive to innovate and develop the strategy continuously so that Pelapak can improve their business through our platform. One of our effort to improve our seller’s quality is by conducting workshops and seminars for Pelapak through the ‘Kopdar’ program. We also created a campaign called #WarungNaikKelas as one of our current strategies. Our key objective in this campaign is to maximize the efficiency and functionality of Mitra Bukalapak by integrating their inventory, distribution and sales recording system.
Mapping Bukalapak’s User Growth
Bukalapak #DataStory is an infographic series that capture highlighted facts about Bukalapak for Indonesia. Our business exists because of the support of our loyal users, both sellers and buyers in Indonesia
From our previous #Datastory, we found that the number of user visit in Lampung increased 16.500 x over the last eight years. On the bigger picture, the business revenue of Pelapak in Sumatra in the last ten months can be equated to 32.500 students getting formally educated to a bachelor degree. It is supported by the fact of one out to eight population in Sumatra categorized as our active user.
How About East Indonesia?
The discussion among West Indonesia then led us to dive deeper into East Indonesia. We all know that one of the key objectives of Indonesia’s future goals is as a global maritime axis through the inter-island connectivity, including the East of Indonesia. The goals will be enhanced through upgrading infrastructure port, within the Indonesian archipelago. Many of the islands remain the missing connectivity to their neighbors and several benefits from the lost intermittent contact that indirectly causes to the economic inequality.
We decided to take part in empowering East Indonesia because it is one of our mission to help grow Indonesia’s economy by providing technological solutions that empower its residents. For that reason, We tried to contribute to an equitable economy in East Indonesia especially by establishing connectivity between community and area.
As a result, many areas in East Indonesia have begun to feel the benefits including the transaction growth, the community management, and access to e-commerce. In another way, it also affected the number of Mitra Bukalapak. Based on the #Datastory, the number of Mitra Bukalapak is scaling up into 365% from 2017, therefore, one out of eight of a micro-industry that counts as SMEs in East Indonesia is a part of Mitra Bukalapak.
For all the existing developments, we actually still have a big plan for empowering Indonesia. We start from the very small part of the economic sector, which is the SMEs. Aligned with the vision, we reveal the deep roots to walk hand in hand with the small business performer, to rise and develop their business then become a part of Indonesia’s prosperity process. To be structured, to embrace, and to be integrated, those are the main values that we wanted to share.
