As the king of fruits still in season in Malaysia, everyone finally got the chance to come back to the local stores to sit down and enjoy the big chunk of delicious yellow flesh after 2 years of various lockdowns and social distancings.
One may think that durian store owners would get the worse deal of the hand during the MCO times because there’s no traffic visiting them. However, some of them actually adopted online platforms to help weather through the bad days and a few are glad that they took the faith of adopting digitalization to their business and one of them is none of than famous local store DurianMan SS2.
As a result, we got to set up an interview with the owner, Cheah Kim Wai, to get some background on this business alongside the overall experience across the years of operating his business in both physical and digital form.
DurianMan started their business back in 1998 and during those times, there was an oversupply issue happening over at Cheah’s farm so he just decided to put all of them in a lorry and sell them to the public alongside other sellers at a cheap price.
But it is not until one day that Cheah received inquiries on whether he’ll work with a delivery service to serve the delicious fruit to anyone does not live around the Subang area. So, the official website was born in 2008.
Contrary to the usual “Select, Weight, and Pay” system applied on-premise, it is just impractical to do this online so instead, the price is calculated based on the weight of the packed flesh for better transparency and accuracy. As a result, even the stingiest customers will get exactly what they paid for.
As an early tech adopter, of course, there were difficulties faced by Cheah, particularly about delivery times and area coverage where many orders are unable to be accommodated. He even tried using the Myteksi app to use taxis as a way of “delivery”.
With the rise of Grab in recent years and thanks to its mature delivery infrastructure, Cheah finally felt the confidence and decided to sell exclusively on the platform starting in 2018. The partnership even saw the store integrating GrabPay in no time so customers can easily make a purchase with the e-wallet service.
In terms of sales, Cheah is not shy to reveal some details too. During the MCO period, the online to offline sales ratio is about 6:4 while the pre-COVID era even saw online figures skyrocket to 50% when there was an online promotion going around.
With how many positive changes were brought forward by Grab’s digital transformation, Cheah admitted that there’s no way he’s ditching online sales because he’s also doing the export business to Hong Kong, Macau, Dubai, and England. Imagine how much he’d lose out if he still sticks to the pen and paper.
Lastly, he advised other traders to embrace online-based business but be sure the partner has a good delivery support backend system that is streamlined and convenient. As for him, Grab has been a major help for his business since 4 years ago.
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