Over the last few weeks or so, I’ve talked about some companies wanting to expand their services to the Philippines. These included WeChat Pay, a branch of WeChat which is a popular app in China used for social messaging and paying for items. Another service that is not expanding in the Philippines but improving their service here is Globe’s GCash, another cashless payment system.
Anyway, I have a friend in Indonesia and we talk a lot about the differences between our countries. She once told me about this thing they have called Go-Jek. It’s an app that offers several services and uses motorcycles to deliver these services. The services include food delivery, grocery delivery, courier services, ride services and a few others. It seems really cool and convenient, and from what my friend tells me, works really well. She often orders food from the app, and when she showed me the app interface and it looked really good.
According to her, the Philippines will be their test country, where they iron out the bugs, find out what will be issues down the line and find fixes for them. I kind of also interpret this as they only plan on rolling out the service to a few areas in the countries to start it off, maybe even just Manila for now. If they do this, I hope they roll it out to the rest of the country quick.
I think something like this would make a lot of sense here in the Philippines because of the abundance of motorcycles and how easy it could be adopted. As for how reception is gonna be, I think it’s gonna be good. The fact that PayMaya is doing really good kinda tells me that a lot of Filipinos want improvements in a lot of areas, especially if it means a huge jump in convenience. Go-Jek would improve convenience by a lot and, I think, would give job opportunities to a lot of people here. I think the biggest thing that could make this a lot better is having deals in place with stores, restaurants, malls and other places to get a discount in exchange for featuring their items in the app. It would be good for everyone involved.
One of the biggest things missing here, in my opinion, is delivery. I think it could also be a cost thing, why have a delivery service if no one uses it? So, in that case, I can understand it. But having a company that would take over delivering stuff for you sounds a lot better. I really hope a lot of stores here will pick up on this and partner with Go-Jek instead of trying to start their own delivery service which might end up failing.
Overall I’m pretty excited, it seems like a really cool service and if it works as well as in Indonesia, then it should be a really good addition here. I just hope they either roll it out to the whole country immediately or roll it out as soon as they can.