Kemenkop UKM: Expansion Of UKM Market Access Can't Be Separated From The Role Of E-Commerce

Illustration. (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - The Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs (KemenkopUKM) noted that MSMEs were able to contribute 60.51 percent to national GDP and could absorb 96.92 percent of the workforce. To date, the number of MSMEs in Indonesia has reached more than 65 million. Of that amount, around 64.6 million are categorized as micro-enterprises.

In various sources, many parties pay attention to micro and small scale business actors. This includes assistance, providing access to capital, policies, and other entrepreneurial facilities.

On the other hand, this has not been seen much for small and medium scale business actors. In fact, small and medium-sized businesses have contributed greatly to the national GDP, which is almost 100 percent.

In the Development Study Forum (FKP) held by the SMERU Research Institute and Tokopedia on Tuesday 27 June, based on its latest research, SMERU Research Institute researcher Wandira Larasati said that small and medium-scale business actors are often considered financially empowered groups of entrepreneurs, have more modern business management, have large-scale businesses, and do not require assistance and convenience as obtained by micro-scale business actors.

"Although there are no problems with business capital, many small and medium-sized entrepreneurs experience obstacles and challenges so that their efforts stagnate and even suffer losses," said the researcher who is familiarly called Dira.

According to Dira, from his research results, several obstacles have often been experienced by business actors, including the capacity of business actors.

"He must adjust his larger production capacity to need good business management and supervision. Also the availability of workers who have not met the company's management needs," he continued.

Regulation constraints have also become a separate homework for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs.

"He has no information about taxes, permits, and several other rules that have not been socialized," said Dira.

In line with Dira, Rossa Novitasari, Head of the Investment Division of SMEs, Kemenkop UKM said, one of the obstacles to SMEs is that the products are not well-standarded.

"It may be that in the first order, products that are sold are of high quality, but second and third orders, the quality of the product is not consistently maintained," he said.

In addition, business legality is also an obstacle because it prevents them from accessing financing.

"That way they experience obstacles when they have to increase their production capacity or increase their services," he said.

Likewise with marketing which is sometimes a challenge in itself. "Luckily we have an e-commerce platform like Tokopedia which can help promote the products and services of business actors more widely to all corners of the country," he added.

Even so, Rossa revealed that the government has also tried its best to overcome the various obstacles experienced by SMEs. One of them is holding cluster-based entrepreneurship training programs according to business types. Then there are also grants and purchases of production equipment, business credit, product certification, and partnership programs.

Indeed, in its implementation the program is sometimes not optimal and will continue to be improved. For example, in the training carried out, the training materials held are often less relevant and are directly targeting the needs of SME actors.

In other words, the training material provided is still too basic. Even though SMEs need more advanced training.

Also present at the event, Alfredo Setiabudi as Senior Vice President of Ads Solution, Tokopedia, explained how Tokopedia already has 4 sales membership schemes: Regular Merchant, Power Merchant, Power Merchant PRO, and Official Store.

"In addition, the marketing aspect is important to be implemented by business actors as a means of introducing products to the target audience, building good images or branding, increasing sales and others. This can be achieved through Tokopedia Marketing Solutions," said Alfredo.

Tokopedia Marketing Solutions has a mission to help businesses from small, medium to large scale to accelerate their business in Tokopedia such as a wider reach to users spread across 99 percent of sub-districts in Indonesia.

Then there is a precedent in all consumer purchase journeys with three characteristics of consumers, namely those who have not decided what to buy, who have decided what to buy, and who visited Tokopedia after seeing attractive offers on other platforms such as social media.

In addition, with their consumer data, Tokopedia Marketing Solutions can help brands and business people target advertising to consumers with the right profile, by prioritizing security principles and personal data protection based on applicable regulations.

Tokopedia Marketing Solutions will help business people handle all matters related to marketing operations on the Tokopedia e-commerce platform.

Tokopedia also helps sellers access capital through ModalToko. CapitalToko is a capital loan facility provided to Tokopedia sellers to develop their business. This feature is a solution for sellers to get additional business capital because the process is easy and the amount of loans can be adjusted to their needs.