Pandemic Becomes Youtap's Opportunity to Accelerate Traditional Retail Digitization

After officially launched last February, the platform that provides e-money processing and platform point-of-sales Youtap was directly faced with a pandemic that had made it difficult for SME owners to run their businesses. To outsmart this condition, the Youtap team went into the market and met the target users to launch a campaign on the importance of using it cashless to touchless.

Through the campaign launched, YouTap claims to be able to adopt an increase of up to 300%. Youtap Indonesia CEO Herman Suharto said, the company has always been consistent with the vision to be present at every level of business in helping and empowering business actors to get the best results.

"We present appropriate technology that can help business players get a comprehensive digital business solution in just one application. We believe that the Youtap Trade Application will make partners merchant we, especially SMEs, can be more productive in developing their businesses," said Herman.

Currently Youtap has 50 thousand partners merchant and has processed about 1 million transactions. The target is that by the end of 2020, Youtap can acquire around 1 million merchant throughout Indonesia. They also plan to expand their partnership with financial services to brand big like McDonalds and others.

"Big brands like McDonalds have also experienced our services during the pandemic. We managed to increase their sales by implementing e-voucher which facilitates the process of buying and paying at outlets," said Herman.

Regarding the competitive landscape, Youtap is dealing with many players. For example, LinkAja, currently they are optimizing the distribution of services for market traders and hawkers. Other applications, such as Dana, are also maneuvering to rely on QRIS, which is currently starting to intensify its penetration. For POS itself, Indonesia already has several services, starting from Moka and Nadipos who are already in the group Gojek, to Qasir, Pawoon, and others.

Regarding financial records, recently new startups have also emerged, such as BukuWarung and BukuKas. Both have received pre-series A funding to expand their business throughout Indonesia, targeting micro retailers.

The digitalization of conventional retail will also take a long time. Because of its nature, it must be comprehensive and form an ecosystem, which means not only from the side of facilitated traders, but also from the side of consumers. While the trend is service adoption e-money in society is steadily increasing. It's just that, the players are getting more and more with a very tight competition.

Special app for merchant

Claiming to be more than the usual cashier platform, Youtap in Indonesia which is the fruit of j Salim Group and Youtap Global, a technology company based in New Zealand. Through the application, all SME owners can more easily make financial reports, collect data on goods, and make personalized notification features.

"This notification works similarly to chat app like WhatsApp. Every morning we remind the number of sales from stalls or business owners so that they can be even more enthusiastic about running the business every day," said Head of Product Development Youtap M. Syaiful Anam.

Although the Basic option can be accessed for free, users who want to enjoy various additional features and special tools can choose the subscription method. In addition to making the process easier and faster, Youtap also continues to receive input from merchant, related to new features or tools what merchants want and need. Starting from home delivery to the process of promoting digitally to a wider target customer.

"One of feedback We have realized what we have received, and we plan to launch a new feature in the next month that can be useful for merchants during this pandemic," said Syaiful.