TOKOPEDIA

William Tanuwijaya grew up poor in Pematangsiantar, North Sumatra. He moved to Jakarta, worked in an internet cafe, and saw firsthand how small merchants across Indonesia's 17,000 islands had no way to reach customers beyond their local village.

In 2009, he and Leontinus Alpha Edison launched Tokopedia with a simple mission: democratize commerce across Indonesia. The platform gave even the smallest merchant on a remote island access to 280 million potential customers.

Tanuwijaya's origin story — from internet cafe worker to founder of the country's biggest marketplace — became one of Indonesia's most inspiring entrepreneurial narratives.

E-commerce marketplace for Indonesia — the country's largest online shopping platform, and since January 2024 the home of TikTok Shop Indonesia too. It connects millions of small and medium merchants with Indonesia's 280 million consumers.

Revenue comes from seller commissions, advertising, logistics services (TokoCabang fulfillment), and fintech. Unlike Amazon, Tokopedia is purely marketplace — it does not sell its own inventory.

Tokopedia Marketplace (millions of sellers across all categories), TokoCabang (fulfillment centers for faster delivery), Tokopedia Play (livestream commerce), Official Store (verified brand marketplace), and integration with GoPay and GoSend for payments and last-mile delivery through the GoTo ecosystem.

Two mergers in three years. In 2021, Tokopedia merged with Gojek — Indonesia's super app for ride-hailing, food delivery and payments — to form GoTo Group, which listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2022.

Then in January 2024, after Indonesia banned social commerce and forced TikTok Shop to shut down locally, ByteDance bought 75.01% of Tokopedia for $840 million and folded TikTok Shop Indonesia into it. GoTo kept the remaining 24.99% plus a quarterly fee tied to Tokopedia's sales volume, which by early 2026 was its single largest contribution to date.

The combined TikTok Shop and Tokopedia entity now controls roughly a third of Indonesian e-commerce.

Indonesia's geography is a logistics nightmare. The country spans 17,000 islands across three time zones.

Delivering a package from Jakarta to Papua can take weeks and cost more than the product itself. Infrastructure is poor, address systems are unreliable, and payment methods vary wildly across regions.

Tokopedia had to essentially build logistics infrastructure in a country that didn't have it.

SoftBank Vision Fund, Alibaba Group, Google, Temasek and Sequoia Capital India were the major investors before Tokopedia merged with Gojek to form GoTo in 2021. Since January 2024 the controlling shareholder has been ByteDance, which paid $840 million for 75.01%.

GoTo (IDX: GOTO) retains 24.99%.