Gojek kept small restaurants trading by making GoFood their storefront

When mobility restrictions hit Indonesia, many micro and small food businesses lost the customer flow that made them viable. GoFood's answer was not to sell software licenses to restaurants. It made the platform itself the storefront, logistics layer, payment rail, and demand aggregator.

ADB's joint study with Gojek says the platform played an important role in keeping MSMEs operating when they otherwise would have been cut off from customers. A separate peer-reviewed study found GoFood was the most-used food-delivery app for 78% of surveyed Indonesian respondents in 2021.

The clever part was sequencing. GoFood lowered entry barriers first, then let merchants compete inside an existing demand pool. That created new pressure from entrants, but it also gave small sellers a survival path that did not require them to become ecommerce companies overnight.

Turn idle kitchens into searchable online storefronts

It solved four adoption barriers at once: storefront, demand, delivery, and payments.

Small merchants could digitize sales without capital spending on their own ordering stack.

The platform converted local food inventory into searchable supply across a city-scale market.

The same data exhaust let researchers and operators see merchant stress, competition, and resilience at granular levels.

For informal or small sellers, the genius is often not a new tool but a full stack that removes every prerequisite they cannot afford.

The platform became a resilience tool as well as a marketplace. ADB's 2023 report used GoFood merchant data to study business continuity and gendered impacts, while the academic study warned that easier entry also intensified competition among merchants. The mechanism worked, but it did not make competition disappear.