Get smart: Indonesia’s ramshackle warung stores go digital

Warung Tiga Putri is not your typical warung . Although it sells snacks, cigarettes and assorted knick-knacks like countless other ramshackle convenience stores across Indonesia’s towns and cities, the tiny bright-yellow kiosk does much more for it is one of Indonesia’s growing number of smart warung . No fewer than five CCTV cameras at the busy Jakarta kiosk collect data on customers, such as their approximate age and sex, which is later analysed to improve marketing, distribution and engagement.

The concept is the brainchild of Warung Pintar, a local tech start-up that has transformed more than 1,000 warung and counting in Jakarta and other Indonesian cities.

“We put in CCTV cameras to know how many people shop there, how many among them are men or women, their ages. Basically we use them to capture the shoppers’ demography,” Warung Pintar co-founder Harya Putra told This Week in Asia . “We realised there was a data blind spot in warung . A lot of things were happening there that we didn’t know about. There’s a lot of opportunities in waru ng because the community and the economy are there, but there was no technology that empowered them.”

Customers at Warung Tiga Putri can also rent power banks, watch television, use free Wi-fi, buy train and plane tickets, charge their mobile phones, and opt for cashless payment via mobile wallets such as Go-Pay and Ovo.

For the kiosk’s owner, Junaidi Salad, Warung Pintar has been a godsend. Before the company approached him about turning his 1.5-metre-wide kiosk into the first-ever smart warung , the 32-year-old was worried about being evicted from the roadside he had illegally occupied for several years. The tech start-up – whose co-founders used to work with Jakarta-based venture capitalist East Ventures – helped Salad gain legal status by moving the kiosk to the car park of one of its co-working spaces, where he doesn’t have to pay rent or for electricity.