Southeast Asia’s leading every day everything app, Grab has announced its Small Business Booster Program, which aims in helping small businesses adapt to the new reality due to COVID-19. The program includes tools and initiatives to make it easier for offline businesses to make the shift online and helps those already on the Grab platform to expand their visibility and adapt their operations to an increasingly digital-reliant world. The initiative extends Grab’s long-term commitment to digitize traditional and small businesses and ensure they are included in the growing digital economy.
“We have faced many new changes and challenges brought about by the pandemic, and we continue to find ways to leverage our platform towards supporting our kababayans in many new ways. As many Filipinos rely on digital-based services, our aim at Grab is to provide meaningful support most especially to small businesses, and bridge the gap on the ever-widening digital divide that these MSMEs have been facing,” according to Grab Philippines President Brian Cu. “With small independent businesses being the backbone of our economy, Grab hopes that by supporting initiatives such as the Department of Agriculture’s Kadiwa ni Ani at Kita, and the Department of Tourism’s Philippine Harvest Initiative – both aimed at supporting farmers and agripreneurs through market access and delivery services, as well as the Department of Trade and Industry’s MSME Reboot Program to aid and further develop our micro- and small businesses; and introducing programs such as the Madiskarteng Boss Club – geared at growing the vibrant social selling community through access to discounts, rebates, loans, placements, and learning opportunities, we get to help grow small businesses in the country to help rejuvenate our economy,” Cu adds.
One of the components of Grab’s Small Business Booster Program is GrabMerchant, an all-in-one, self-serve merchant platform for business owners to help grow their online customer base, optimize their operations, while keeping costs in check. GrabMerchant will have features like Insights and Ads.
The enterprise-grade Insights tool within the GrabMerchant platform will give businesses a view into their sales, operations, customer profile and purchasing habits, and the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. It allows businesses to spot and respond quickly to new opportunities such as creating bundled meals based on what customers are ordering and equips them to address operational inefficiencies.
The platform will also have its own ads creation tool that empowers merchant-partners to build their own food banner and food search ads, and tracks the ad performance.
GrabMerchant will eventually be replacing the GrabFood platform locally and will be available to existing Grab merchant-partners as an app and as a web portal. The app will roll out progressively starting today, followed by the web portal by end-August 2020.