How Does Gojek-like App Bring Merchants and Customers Closer?

Customers and drivers, coupled with merchants, are the key components of any delivery-demand ecosystem.

A Gojek-like app connects the three of them, unifying the line of communication in a much more coordinated fashion.

So you can develop your Gojek-like app with a well-planned approach.

Learn how Gojek was able to successfully leverage technology to bring merchants and customers closer than ever.

Introduction

Gojek’s food delivery product, GoFood, lists more than 400,000 merchants to fulfill food cravings. A Gojek-like super app has the potential to do just that.

First, let’s understand the flow of a Gojek app for merchant partners and connect the dots from there.

Merchant Super App

Merchants are shopkeepers, local store-based businessmen, or small business owners.

They are capable of owning a physical store as well as a large chain of restaurants.

Without the app, people contacted them either via a phone number found in the business directories (Yellow Pages) or advertisements.

Furthermore, the standard approach that is active right now is to search the name of the restaurant and see if it has a website.

Although the contact details can be found with just a search, this is not the goal.

In the early Gojek app development phase, merchants were on-boarded by uploading their menus to the system without any contact details.

To place an order, the customer would send the order details to the driver. The driver would then go to the merchant and place the order on behalf of the customer.

Sounds a bit off, right?

The driver would wait around for the order to get ready, pay in cash, pick up the order, and deliver it to the customer.

For a merchant that has multiple chains of restaurants, this system wreaked havoc as they were invoiced for commissions that their outlet name made.

Nevertheless, this trial and error phase was crucial to the development of the delivery process as we know it now.

Customer Super App

The starting phase of Gojek solely focused on delivering food to the customer but overlooked the problems of the merchants.

Being an inefficient system, there was no record of the transaction, and the receipts were hard copies.

From the perspective of the customer, whether the business is small or large, it should fulfill its order demands within the budget. Therein lies the problem.

Which merchant had the best food items? How do you find the best one in an instant?

Well, Gojek took this as a challenge and did something similar that forever changed the way we order food online.

Remember that Gojek started with no-tie-ups with restaurants? With this freedom, Gojek was able to successfully bring merchants and customers closer than ever.

This is an achievement in itself. If you’re willing to make a Gojek-like app, try to solve the same problem as well.

If you are running a store-based business, a Gojek-like app can close the gap even more.

Let’s understand this achievement step by step and see how it connects to the merchant problem we discussed earlier.

Scope Beyond Food Orders

As a business owner or store manager, have you ever thought about the pickup and delivery times of your order?

You must have! Sure, the driver has everything to do with it, but what about the line of communication? ETA? Real-time location?

First, let’s address the concern about the food preparation and delivery time. In the early days of Gojek, a portion of the time was spent by the driver waiting for the food.

This was mostly the case since the merchant started the preparation of the food item only after the driver arrived!

This led to two important discoveries:

• The delivery time should be reduced
• The wait time should be used to fulfill other orders

Second, let’s address the issues related to order cancellation. Let’s say that from your Gojek-like app, your customers placed an order.

However, after the driver was assigned, they canceled that order.

What happens now?

Following are some of the features you should keep in mind that Gojek introduced to pave the way for closing the gap on connectivity issues:

Cashless Payments

With the introduction of this feature, the drivers had in-app wallets associated with their accounts.

To avoid cash, transactions between the driver and the merchant would be wallet-to-wallet.

This allowed Gojek to immediately deduct the commission from the merchant's wallet.

No more pending invoices now!

OTP For Restaurant Verification

With millions of order demands, picking up the right order was increasingly difficult.

One-time passwords (OTP) helped the drivers verify the restaurant back in the day.

That is what happens when the ease of doing business is leveraged by innovation.

Catalog Management

This feature boosted the product experience through the roof.

Now, merchants can update their restaurant details that customers saw on the app directly.

To clarify, options like item availability, menu adaptation, and price adjustments, among others, were available to the merchants.

One particular case was the addition of the images.

The reference images improve the look of every single dish, allowing the hesitant customer to order instantly.

Real-time Information

Out-of-stock items, closed restaurants, and drivers assigned are some of the quick-changing information that changes every second.

With this feature of showing real-time updates every second to your customers, eventually, the customer will feel more fulfilled than ever.

Multiple moving pieces align in real-time, giving more power to direct merchant-to-customer communication.

Ease Of Access

In a highly congested urban setting, delivering a food item is a challenge in itself.

Every new location requires more in-app calling and coordination over the phone, which is not the best use of anyone’s time.

It would be best if you built your Gojek-like app by identifying popular spots that later suggest your customers as pre-defined pickup points.

With the two-factor verification of GPS pins along with visuals, your customers can confirm their pickup point and wait in peace.

Not bad, eh?

Conclusion

Are you interested in testing an app with the same features? Through ease of use, you can also surprise your customers with the pickup experience that has evolved over the years.

For every merchant, the bridge to success goes through a successful customer-buying experience. This comes before the actual product or service that you base the business model on.

This is far more complex than you think if you want to build a Gojek-like app.

So, instead of building a Gojek-like app, why don’t you invest in a pre-built app?

Test the demo and see for yourself.

The latest features and a wide range of services are waiting for you.