PETALING JAYA: Grab is shifting its focus to help small traditional businesses embrace and thrive within the digital economy, which includes collaborating with state governments and other organisations to deliver Ramadhan Favourites as well as adding five more markets across Selangor to their Pasar by GrabMart service effective April 24.
The tech company elaborated the expansion is due to the positive feedback it has received for the service which enabled its customers to buy fresh produce, spices, poultry, seafood and meat directly from TTDI Market.
Grab Malaysia country head Sean Goh commented that it saw encouraging results from the measures to protect its merchants, drivers and delivery partner’s livelihoods during this financially turbulent time
“Therefore, our partnerships with local governments and organisations will give us a larger stage to accelerate our support for small, traditional businesses and micro-entrepreneurs.
“We hope to help them, not only to serve the millions of Grab users, but also to leverage on our platform to serve their regular customers conveniently and efficiently,” he said in a press release.
Grab stated that the combined impact from its small-biz relief programme and its ‘local heroes’ campaign, has seen encouraging results on two fronts.
30% more small, independent restaurants and hawkers have opened their doors to deliver food, and an uptick of 25% in orders has been seen, as a result of positive response from customers rallying around their neighbourhood local favourites.
“In parallel, we are also actively supporting restaurants with immediate cash flow through our zero-interest ‘Deferred Commissions’ programme. Furthermore, we introduced zero-commissions for any self-pickup orders and absorbed all related transactions costs for orders received via social channels with a GrabPay payment option,”Goh added.
Goh explained that although the reduction in the merchant’s commissions alone may be considered a temporary fix, the majority of commissions actually go to the delivery network as income.
“Considering the circumstances of Covid-19 and MCO, it was imperative for us to adapt and innovate to establish a sustainable economic ecosystem. Hence, we decided to focus on helping our community of merchants thrive by growing their demand, and in doing so, create income for thousands of delivery partners,” he said.
To support the increase in demand for delivery services, the tech company has mobilised more than 100,000 GrabCar drivers, to ensure that drivers have an income despite the impact of movement control order (MCO) on e-hailing business.
