Carrefour Indonesia to Launch Online Supermarket

During the dotcom bubble, I still remember there was one convenience store online which was founded by the Lippo Group. Named Lippo Shop, this site serves the Jabotabek area in delivering daily necessities. It was the year 2000. The internet connection at that time was still slow and so did business online. Many people in Indonesia don't even know what the internet is about, while I myself don't understand how to pay for transactions using a payment system online which is quite ancient. History records, the site failed, due to poor management and the inability to deliver customer orders. At that time, Lippo had not even created their own hypermarket retail network.

It's 2012. A major retail company will try to change this. Large hypermarket company Carrefour Indonesia, originally from France, will soon launch a store online to sell the products of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) partners. In Spain and some other European countries, shops online for daily necessities Carrefour was founded has become commonplace, but this is definitely something new in Indonesia. Presence online Carrefour is currently limited to disseminating information about catalogs and other promotions.

According to Chairul Tanjung, as quoted from Cash, shop online will recently be affiliated with the largest portal in Indonesia Detik. Both are owned by CT Group. Unfortunately the shop online this will not come before Lebaran.

Infrastructure in Indonesia now has a better internet connection, as well as logistics distribution and a trusted payment system. People are quite familiar with the shopping environment online. It is logical that the Carrefour-Detik partnership will learn from Lippo Group's mistakes. But the problems that arise are not only from the system. Problems can come from the consumers themselves.

Buy through convenience store online would be like telling people to go to the supermarket and buy us the items on the list. While this will save you time to be able to do other things, the level of satisfaction may not be as high as choosing directly the item you want to buy. Supermarket shopping is all about buying what we really need, not just what we want. The feeling is completely different and can cause hesitation to try the service online this.

I'm sure this won't quickly replace the usual shopping behavior. Nonetheless, this will provide a new perception of how online commerce will help the general public live their daily lives.