GrabShop’s digital catalogue simplifies social selling

Araj Mohandasan, Lead Product Manager, Buy with Grab; Darren Chong, Senior Data Scientist, Deliveries

. September 27, 2024 . Regional

Grab is piloting GrabShop, a feature that lets sellers share a digital catalogue of items with buyers on social media.

GrabShop is currently in pilot in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Thailand.

We have just taken our first step towards a larger vision: giving sellers the flexibility to tap into Grab’s capabilities, no matter where they interact with their customers.

The world of social sellers

Think of a typical small business—a specialty bakery or a gift shop that has built its brand on social media. It’s their primary channel for interacting with customers, so they want to serve orders there directly.

But sellers aren’t using a tool to simplify and connect the steps in this process. When customers make a request, there’s a lengthy back and forth via direct messages until the order and shipping address is confirmed. The seller then asks for proof of payment, and sends out the parcel. It requires filling in data manually across multiple tools.

GrabShop’s digital catalogue

This is where GrabShop comes in.

Instead of explaining items, pricing, and asking the customer to type exactly what they want, the seller shares a link to a digital catalogue that shows the customer what items are available, along with prices and pictures. The customer selects items and quantities, and the seller confirms and waits for proof of payment before sending.

Alternatively, the seller can pre-select products on their end and send a unique link with the order summary to the customer for confirmation.

Apart from being convenient for buyers, using GrabShop’s catalogue has many advantages for sellers. They have a neat archive of active and past orders, instead of unorganised chat messages, and they can choose one-click fulfilment through GrabExpress, without having to re-enter information manually.

Testing and improving

We have rolled out the beta version of Grab Shop’s digital catalogue to a select group of merchants—specifically, heavy users of GrabExpress in our pilot countries.

The feedback is encouraging. We see a high order confirmation rate from customers who have been sent a digital catalogue, suggesting an intuitive and effective user experience.

We are looking into integrating AI tools into future iterations of GrabShop to make it even easier for sellers to set up the digital catalogue.

Buy with Grab

We have just taken our first steps with GrabShop. Our next target is to let sellers and buyers settle payments seamlessly, without leaving the Grab app.

In the future, other aspects of Grab could be modularised and made available to Southeast Asia’s vast small business ecosystem, empowering them to cater to different types of customers on a variety of channels.

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