Nov 2, 2018
Introducing Technology and Digital Financial Literacy Through Tokopedia Center
This experience center is reaching out to the non-millennials.
Exactly 72 years ago, Indonesians celebrated Oeang Republic of Indonesia (ORI) as its official payment instrument and replaced the colonial era currencies from the Netherlands and Japan. ORI has now transformed into Rupiah, but nevertheless, we still have a lot of work to achieve economic equality. To this date, Indonesia’s financial inclusion ratio is at 63%, which means that there are still many Indonesians out there who have not enjoyed the convenience of shopping and the ease of financial transactions.
The government, however, is positively confident about targeting an increase in Indonesia's financial inclusion ratio to 75% by 2019. The target was followed by the Government's invitation to all parties to improve digital financial service offerings, including the private sector.
Tokopedia Center and Financial Inclusion
As a technology company with a mission to democratize commerce through technology, Tokopedia also takes part to help the government in driving financial inclusion. As per August 2019, there are altogether 13 Tokopedia Centers within Indonesia: Boyolali, Padang, Batulayang, Padang Kandis, Bandung, Cirebon, Kuningan, Tasikmalaya, Malang, Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Medan, and Makassar.
The level of enthusiasm on the launched date was quite positive, as made evident by the significant growth in the number of visitors since it was first opened. The number of transactions from two Tokopedia Center, Padang and Boyolali, increased by 2x since their opening. Also, though still recovering from the recent disaster, Tokopedia Center Palu recorded an interesting growth as well. Within its couple of months of operation, the transaction growth reached almost 50%. The most popular transactions made by visitors at the Tokopedia Center are purchases from the Marketplace and payment of digital products, such as the purchase of airplane and train tickets.
As was told by our team on the site, visitors who came to Tokopedia Center, who are mostly the non-millennials, have some interesting stories that we found unique in this digital era.
Unique Stories from Tokopedia Center
When Tokopedia Center was officially opened, many visitors who came are looking for information about Tokopedia or the internet in general. They asked the team about how to use the Tokopedia apps, creating a new account to sell their products, or even creating their first email account!
For some locations, Tokopedia Center is probably the first experience center that they have in the city. Many people are still not used to shopping online but they do know that you can find anything in Tokopedia. With lack of exposures, they still feel uncomfortable transferring their money directly to an online platform. Thus, what they did was they actually withdraw their money from the ATM, bring the cold-hard cash to the store, and gave it to our team to do their shopping for them.
“I remember there is this one user who came to Tokopedia Center in Padang asking for a help to buy a laptop through Tokopedia. The person paid cash for the laptop - all 11 million Rupiahs of it,” explained Doni Nathaniel, the Senior Strategic Development for Tokopedia Center.
Another user came looking for round-trip airplane tickets for two passengers for a total price of IDR 5.3 million, and guess what - they also wanted to pay in cash. Afterward, the team educates them on how they can actually transact very very safely because Tokopedia uses an escrow to protect both of their seller and buyer.
Fun fact though: customer actually start shopping online on their own, but they want to open the package only at the Tokopedia Center. “So when the item that they order from Tokopedia delivered to the house, they bring the package to Tokopedia Center and invite all officers to open it together,” explained Doni. But as Armstrong would put it, that’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind :)
Aside from the marketplace and digital products, Tokopedia also continues to strive for economic equality in Indonesia through its fintech product. Tokopedia owned several fintech products such as mutual funds, capital loans, credit cards, and so on to support building a cashless society. All digital and fintech products are intended to facilitate financial access with ease for all users. Mutual funds, for example, are intended to nurture the habit of investing in Indonesian society because they can even invest small, starting from only IDR 10,000.
