Eight Years of Startup Online Grocery "Seroyamart", Claims Still Continues to Experience Business Growth

As a platform online groceries which has been present since 2013, Seroyamart claims to experience significant user growth during the pandemic. This is due to restrictions on activities and rules for working at home, resulting in changes in consumer behavior in shopping. From a business perspective, the company has experienced 30-40% growth since March 2020.

To DailySocial.id, Founder & CEO of Seroyamart Sebastian Wijaya revealed, from an operational point of view, the company had experienced problems when several of its employees contracted Covid-19, which almost paralyzed the warehouse.

"But the pandemic has helped educate consumers about shopping online and also very changing mindset consumers from always looking for discounts and free shipping to consumers who prioritize convenience and safety in shopping."

Currently Seroyamart already has 100 thousand active users and more than 100 brand (local and imported) that the platform accommodates. Regarding the user segment, apart from aiming at B2C, they have also targeted B2B by serving office needs. His role is more as e-distributors/enablers for some grocery brands and also help manage their sales through online marketplace.

Seroyamart also sells Indonesian products to various parts of the world. Especially on location brand partners which does not have a distributor. Most of the export buyers are platforms E-commerce in foreign countries.

Interestingly, now the company is also developing in-house brand, there is already a rice product with the brand "Cap Ikan Mas" which is also trusted by Ismaya Group, Accor Hotels, and several others including Cockkit.

"In addition to rice and snacks, we are in the process of presenting house brands others such as dish soap, floor soap with good quality but without too high a price. We really like the product no nonsense from Amazon Basics and see the potential for this product segmentation in our market," said Sebastian.

Focus on daily needs

Commodity-wise, Seroyamart focuses on daily necessities which tend to be dry products instead of vegetables or meat. Currently, there are not many new players who have a business model farm to table. For Seroyamart, the business model is quite complex in terms of margins and operations and is still very challenging. Especially if it's a concept farm to table They do not buy their vegetables wholesale from the main market.

"Indonesian people still like to shop at the market for vegetables, fruit and meat, but they don't mind shopping dry goods or dry products such as instant noodles, cooking oil and soap or shampoo from supermarket and online. Especially if there is big savings or brand deals, said Sebastian.

For areas they have warehouses or depots within a 2 km radius. The thing that is still an obstacle for them until now is economic units from B2C. Especially if the service is within a radius of more than 2 km from one point, the calculation of shipping costs is still an obstacle.

"So outside of the 2 km radius service, we choose to focus on business and trade consumers. But we always target to open more depots in densely populated areas," said Sebastian.

Currently Seroyamart is viewing bisnis Grocery for retail is very mature and can no longer be categorized as niche. Business model farm to table also actually has been around for a long time which is done by conventional sellers. What then became the focus of Seroyamart was its implementation, namely in operational excellence and cost efficiency.

"E-commerce is actually a distribution and logistics game. Technology is only 10% of the business, 90% is field operationsand inventory management. Specifically for revenue growth depending on how big Operating Expenditures (opex). The biggest opex is employee salaries, and as long as the margins can close, they can survive," said Sebastian.

He added that what is important is the understanding that to do scale-up service E-commerce meaning Opex must increase proportionally. For that it is needed additional revenue generator from the trade side or brand itself --- larger margins and can contribute to closing Opex.

Present a subscription option

In particular, Seroyamart strives to keep up with technological developments and is always flexible in serving customers. They also have a booking service via chat and also the first platform to offer grocery subscription. Even though the mechanism subscription in Indonesia is still not supported by Bank Indonesia, online merchant not allowed to do auto-deduct user credit card.

"Many of our shopping customers do not interact with the site or application. Because it is considered complicated by mothers out there to carry out an iterative process. So they prefer to order via chat and they also like the features 'buy again' us," said Sebastian.

If initially Seroyamart only focused on premium products, now all products are available to users. Compared to some other players, they have the advantage of stock that is almost always available and available, This is because, they have their own inventory and do not depend on supermarket or minimarket others for stock supply. Seroyamart is currently also expanding its offerings 1 hour delivery.

"There are several targets that we want to achieve, including bringing in-house brand with the best quality and also expansion 1-hour delivery to many more points. To support this plan we are looking for partners who want to do business online groceries," concluded Sebastian.