Grab Small Business Booster Program announced

Grab has announced its Small Business Booster Program to help small businesses adapt to the new normal.

In partnership with the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Tourism, Grab has started its eKadiwa program, which connects farmers and other rural agripreneurs to reach their consumers directly. Grab has also partnered with the Department of Trade and Industry’s MSME Reboot program to provide digitalization support and solutions for MSMEs during the pandemic.

Social distancing measures have changed consumer behavior, leading to an elevated demand for digital services. This is expected to carry on, even as movement restrictions ease. The Small Business Booster Program aims to digitalize small businesses, either by giving them a digital shopfront on the Grab platform or through e-payments integration.

The program will include several key components:

• GrabMerchant: The Grab Merchant platform is a tool that helps business owners grow their online customer base, optimize their operations, and keep costs in check. It will be available to existing merchant-partners as an app and web portal, which will roll out in June 2020. It includes the following features:
  • Insights: The Insights tool gives merchants a detailed analysis of their sales, operations, customer profiles, purchasing habits, and the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
  • Ads: The Ads creation tool allows users to build their won food banner and food search ads and tracks the ad performance.
• Offline to Online (O2O) Merchant Support Program: Offline businesses can connect with Grab’s store-builder partners to set up their stores and integrate GrabPay for checkout.
• Grab commits to support over 1,000 Filipino homegrown merchants with advertising solutions to help improve their discoverability across Grab’s customer base: Merchant-partners who place ads on GrabFood see a 300% rate of return on ad spent. Grab will also create personalized ads for over 1,000 small GrabFood and GrabExpress merchant-partners with the Homegrown Heroes initiative. The ads will be visible on the most prominent spaces within the app for 5 weeks starting July.

“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,” says 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.”