Posted by In 2023 I wrote about Mitra Bukalapak, the programme that set out to bring Indonesia’s warungs into the digital economy. At the time it looked like one of the most successful attempts anywhere to modernise the traditional shop. Three years later Mitra is still running, but it has shrunk, and the company behind it now earns most of its money from something else entirely.
Where it started
Warungs, the small family-run shops found on almost every street in Indonesia, are a cornerstone of the economy. They had long been overlooked by technology companies and underserved by the supply chain, still relying on old ways of buying stock, managing it and keeping the books.
Bukalapak, one of Indonesia’s first e-commerce unicorns, launched Mitra Bukalapak in 2017 as its online-to-offline (O2O) arm. The idea was to use the shop as the bridge between the app and customers who were not online themselves. Through the Mitra app, a warung could restock, and could sell its neighbours a range of digital services: phone credit, data packages, prepaid electricity tokens, bill payments and money transfers. In effect, the shop became a small logistics and financial agent for its street, with more than 40 virtual products to sell.
The growth was remarkable. Mitra users rose from 3.4 million in 2019 to 15.2 million in 2022. A Nielsen survey that year put Mitra Bukalapak in first place among Indonesia’s O2O platforms, used by 56% of the warungs that took part in O2O business.
The pivot
The parent company was struggling in its main business. Bukalapak’s marketplace for physical goods faced fierce competition from Shopee, Tokopedia and later TikTok Shop, and it was losing money. In January 2025 Bukalapak announced it would stop selling physical goods altogether. Orders stopped in February. The company said physical products made up less than 3% of its revenue, while the cost of running the marketplace had kept rising. Job cuts followed, and there were further cuts in 2026.
What was left was reorganised into four businesses: Mitra Bukalapak, gaming, investment and retail.
Gaming takes over, Mitra shrinks
Gaming, mainly selling top-ups and vouchers for online games, is now by far the biggest of the four. In the second quarter of 2026 it brought in Rp1.39 trillion in revenue.
Mitra went the other way. Its revenue for 2025 was about Rp794 billion, down by more than 60% on the year before. In the second quarter of 2026 it earned Rp152 billion, against Rp188 billion a year earlier. Management says the shrinking is deliberate: it is dropping low-margin products, and Mitra’s contribution margin rose by almost half to Rp29 billion over the same period.
The offer to the warung has narrowed too. Mitra is now essentially a digital service counter: phone credit, data, electricity tokens and game vouchers, plus card machines and QR payment speakers so the shop can take digital payments. Supplying warungs with physical stock is no longer at the heart of it.
[FIELD NOTE: Anything you saw in Indonesian warungs yourself, for example how they buy their stock, or whether the Mitra app or a rival was in use.]
What it says about digitising the traditional shop
Mitra Bukalapak proved that shopkeepers will adopt technology quickly when it earns them money. Fifteen million users is no small achievement. But the part that earned money was never the supply of goods. It was the small commission on phone credit, bills and payments, which needs no truck, no warehouse and no stock.
That matches what happened in Africa. TradeDepot in Nigeria moved into making its own brands, and MaxAB-Wasoko in Egypt and East Africa turned to lending. Bukalapak kept the warung network and dropped most of the physical side. Three companies on two continents came to the same conclusion: delivering goods to small shops is very hard to make pay, and the margin is in the services that ride on top of it.
First published in 2023. Updated November 2026.
