Offline to online: Giving Jaya Grocer supermarket its digital wings

Aaron Gill, Head of E-commerce

. July 31, 2023 . Malaysia

Online grocery shopping is becoming a regular part of mainstream consumer buying behaviour, as people add online shopping to their regular brick-and-mortar supermarket runs.

In Southeast Asia, online grocery market size is expected to reach nearly $17 billion by 2026, with a projected compound growth rate of 16 per cent from 2022 to 2026, according to a McKinsey report.

When Grab acquired Malaysian supermarket chain Jaya Grocer in 2022, our first move was to rapidly digitise all its outlets and bring them onto the GrabMart platform. We now have 41 Jaya Grocer outlets on GrabMart, up from the initial 12.

In the past year, Jaya Grocer’s online sales as a proportion of total sales grew 10 times while the order fill rate—which measures how efficiently orders are fulfilled—improved by 20 percentage points across the same period.

Integrating Jaya Grocer’s inventory

To get there, we first had to sync Jaya Grocer’s product catalogue and inventory systems with GrabMart. We had to do this for the thousands of SKUs listed on GrabMart.

This automation helps ensure that staff don’t have to manually update the online inventory as the day goes, so as to keep GrabMart’s listing up-to-date in real-time, and avoid human errors and delays.

Meanwhile, an accurate view of inventory levels was also necessary for us to track sales patterns, customer preferences and inventory performance.

Keeping the inventory live also prevents customers from ordering out-of-stock items.

Pick and scan

We wanted to streamline the new GrabMart order bookings coming in, and help smoothen the flow from taking orders to packing.

Previously, pickers printed out receipts and manually checked off items as they gathered them in the store.

Now, with Jaya Grocer’s integrated inventory, we made that available on the picker app, so the worker can see where to go to get the items, and check those off electronically as they go.

Better yet, a new logic was written into the picker app that gave them the items in a sequence, ordered by where the items are placed in a store. This dramatically cut down the amount of time needed to get all the items in an order, because pickers were guided through the aisles in a flow, without needing to go back and forth.

We integrated the picker app with Jaya Grocer’s barcode database, helping to cut down on human error from selecting the wrong item SKU. When the barcode detects a match with an item in a list, it’s checked off automatically and the picker can move on to the next.

While you can use the scanning function on a smartphone, we also developed a handheld device with a barcode scanner that is linked to the app. This device can detect barcodes much more quickly than a smartphone, and is available for all our merchant-partners on GrabMart.

Making the catalogue app-friendly

With Jaya Grocer now on GrabMart, we wanted to improve the browsing experience on the app to encourage more consumers to buy their groceries online.

Through user testing, we found that customers typically already have one or two items in mind when they go to the Jaya Grocer page via GrabMart. But they struggled to locate these items because the topfold—the portion of the page consumers see before scrolling down—was focused on Jaya Grocer’s details such as ratings and delivery fees.

Consumers said they had to spend too much time digesting the page and scrolling before reaching the item they wanted, presenting too much friction for most to shop around and find more things to add to their cart.

To make the user experience more intuitive, our product team redesigned Jaya Grocer’s homepage on GrabMart to allow consumers to view item categories and the search bar at a glance so that they can easily access items that they have in mind. We found that such information was more relevant to consumers during their in-app shopping experience.

Getting more out of shopping

Today, Jaya Grocer’s loyalty programme is also integrated with our Grab Unlimited membership system. This allowed Jaya Grocer to offer deals to the wider Grab Unlimited member base, who earn GrabRewards points from their purchases online and in person at Jaya Grocer.

We have also rolled out GrabPay across all the Jaya Grocer physical stores. This expands the usage of our cashless wallet and gives consumers another flexible, convenient payment method in-store.

We’re excited to bring this loyalty platform to other retailers and supermarket operators, allowing them to tap our growing user base and track user behaviour and spending within the Grab platform.

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