(Additional reporting by Nathaniel Fetalvero)

Valued at over US$7 billion, Tokopedia has earned its place as Indonesia’s largest online marketplace. Since its inception, the Jakarta-based unicorn has raised US$2.4 billion of disclosed funding and has over 90 million monthly active users and 6.2 million merchants on its platform.

On top of its ecommerce business, the company has launched several fintech initiatives, partnering with other local startups like digital wallet firm Ovo and peer-to-peer lending platform Funding Societies. While Tokopedia began with selling physical goods, it has now expanded to also offer digital services like bill payments and flight and train-ticket booking.

However, the company faces challenges in providing a seamless online experience during times of high traffic, thanks to its large user base and breadth of features.

Seamless shopping

In 2018, Tokopedia organized Ramadan Ekstra, a televised program that extended special deals to Indonesian shoppers during the Islamic holy month.

The event attracted 73 million visitors to the online marketplace, exceeding the company’s expectations. The increased traffic overloaded Tokopedia’s servers, which meant some shoppers had to deal with a slower platform.

“Imagine you organize a party for 100 people, and then you have 200 or 300 people show up. Even if they have a good time, you know that you could’ve done better,” explains Tahir Hashmi, the firm’s vice president of engineering.

That’s why for last year’s iteration of Ramadan Ekstra, Tokopedia worked with cloud technology service provider Alibaba Cloud to review its architecture, streamline unoptimized queries, and ensure that its systems were top-notch.

Alibaba Cloud’s ApsaraDB for RDS tool, for instance, provided Tokopedia’s engineers with a full range of solutions from backup and recovery to diversified data storage. This helped the firm maintain its responsiveness to queries, even with high amounts of traffic.

The collaboration paid off: Ramadan Ekstra 2019 achieved a gross merchandise volume of US$1.3 billion in a single month and reached 97% of districts in Indonesia. The daily transaction value it recorded on May 17 also surpassed the total amount that Tokopedia earned in its first six years as a business.

“What’s beautiful is that the experience [for our customers] was very seamless and smooth,” adds Herman Widjaja, senior vice president of engineering at Tokopedia.

Enabling innovation

Aside from allowing the firm to offer a better user experience, Hashmi says Alibaba Cloud’s services also helped Tokopedia’s engineers to “focus more on product improvement and feature enhancement, and less on the operations.”

For example, one functionality the team was able to develop was image-based searches.

“In a developing economy, and especially considering how consumption patterns change, doing a text-based search is really good – it’s really important – but it’s not enough,” says the executive.

By leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s image search library, customers can now simply take a picture of an item they like, upload the photo on Tokopedia’s marketplace, and find it on the platform to purchase.

“We continue exchanging ideas, and based on our brainstorming, we are able to develop innovative solutions,” says Widjaja.

Alibaba Cloud is the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group. It provides a comprehensive suite of global computing services to startups, corporations, and government organizations worldwide, as well as to merchants doing business on Alibaba Group’s marketplaces.

Find out more about Alibaba Cloud’s range of cloud services here.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.