The Edhe: Digitalising the least digital - a helping hand for small traditional businesses

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2020 has been an unprecedented year. Overnight, our lives turned 180 degrees, and as a country, we have embraced the Malaysian spirit and confronted Covid-19 together. We came together to support essential frontline workers, comfort those that have suffered losses and are actively encouraging those around us.

As a platform, Grab was also significantly impacted at the onset of the movement control in March. Overnight, demand for rides declined significantly, affecting income for more than a hundred thousand driver-partners, while our delivery capacity was severely stretched. Fortunately, we were able to pivot our drivers to support our delivery service while investing significantly in COVID safety and protection measures.

It was also a make-or-break year economically for businesses of all shapes and sizes, especially for small and traditional businesses that are facing the economic impact of Covid-19. We've heard from many micro-SMEs (MSME) about the significant challenges they faced in navigating the shift to social and digital channels, while dealing with the logistical challenges due to the pandemic.

As a homegrown tech enabler, we saw an urgent need for us to adapt our business and invest significantly in our technology to address this fundamental gap for businesses while ensuring our delivery network had the appropriate safety requirements such as masks and sanitisers as well as contactless deliveries.

We enabled thousands of these small traditional merchants to transition their business online, be it for delivery on GrabFood, GrabMart, GrabExpress or to receive digital and online payments via GrabPay. We also launched a variety of initiatives for MSMEs, such as the 'Small Biz Relief Fund', 'Support Local Heroes' marketing campaign, and introduced Pasar on GrabMart. Our latest launch is FoodCourts on GrabFood where we've brought on more than 1,000 small hawkers stall businesses across Malaysia onto our GrabFood platform. These programs aim to provide additional online visibility and onboarding support whilst increasing demand for these small and traditional businesses, who might have significantly less resources compared to larger businesses.

In addition, we collaborated closely with government agencies in key efforts such as the Grab Ramadhan E-Kitchen and economic stimulus programmes such as ePenjana and Shop Malaysia Online (SMO). The ePenjana and SMO initiatives also helped to accelerate the adoption of cashless transactions. Across our platforms, we have seen a 60% increase in users adopting cashless payments. This increased adoption also helped merchants reduce the risk of handling physical receipts and cash.

We are thankful for the opportunities to collaborate in these government programmes as they further accelerate the digitisation efforts for small and traditional business. For example, Rosaline Ong, who owns Lizar Chilli, has been selling ready-to-cook pastes and marinades from the same market stall in Pasar Besar TTDI for the last three decades. However during MCO, it was not only difficult for her to keep her store open, but to also cater to her customers due to the limited business operation hours. She decided to move online via GrabMart, and although it took a while for her to adjust to the technology, it has been a successful transition for her, and has also widened her customer base.

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Rosiah Abi Asri, who sells nasi kukus ayam berempah, sup bihun, and more transformed her business model completely when she became one of the 133 bazar vendors who were part of the Grab Ramadan eKitchen. This enabled her to focus on making her delicious food which is highly sought after at previous Ramadan Bazaars. Grab supported her in developing her digital menu, reaching out to customers and making sure her customers received their food in time for the breaking of fast.

But getting the likes of Lizar and Rosiah to embrace digital economy is just half the battle won. When we speak to many of these merchants, they speak candidly that digitalising their business was a means of survival but are unsure on how to further grow on digital platforms.

Therefore, as we continue our commitment to digitalise the least digital, we want to further empower these businesses with the tools and the know-how to fully benefit from being on a digital platform like Grab.

To achieve this, we introduced a holistic suite of tools designed to empower merchants, especially small, traditional and medium businesses on our platform to grow their business with us through digital economy.

Self-serve merchant platform

Grab's newly revamped merchant platform gives merchants more autonomy to manage their online store. This includes updating their menu, adding latest promotions and also features to better manage operational issues such as out-of-stock. We've also enabled personalised menu insights for our merchants, so they can further optimise and enhance their menus using data.

Merchant resource portals

The Grab merchant blog and Grab Merchant Academy portal houses latest business updates as well as how-to videos for business owners to find more information or tips to improve their operations and using our new features.

Merchant community sessions (Merchant webinars)

Following the influx of new businesses onboarded to Grab, community sessions and webinars are proving to be good channels to continuously engage with our merchants, provide tips on features and general business updates. We look forward to more of these sessions in the new year.

Merchant discovery on the Grab app

Similar to driving demand for online merchants, our all-new Merchant Nearby feature in the Grab app drives demand to GrabPay merchants by indicating businesses nearby that accept GrabPay as a payment method. This increases their discoverability and drives more foot traffic to their physical stores. Merchants can also push customised promotions to their loyal customers and encourage more spending. Since introducing this feature, we have now listed thousands of merchants so they are easily discovered by Grab users.

Enabling deaf merchants

In our efforts to provide access to all possible merchant partners, we also distributed a customised 'GrabForGood' deaf merchant starter kit specifically for our deaf merchants to help them perform better. The customised merchant device includes a wristband that vibrates to indicate an incoming order, whilst the standard device has a ringing tone.

We are humbled by the trust thousands of small traditional businesses have given us in 2020. This amplifies our long-term commitment to digitalise more traditional and small businesses to ensure they are included in the growing digital economy. We want to continue engaging with them and working with agencies like MDEC in their initiatives like #SayaDigital to find innovative ways through technology to support and uplift more local businesses.

We also acknowledge that there are many areas where we need to continue to improve to better serve our customers and to partner our merchants better and more sustainably. As we come together as a nation in the coming year, we will do our part to make sure no one is left behind in the digital wave.

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