Delivering a Package in a Country With 17,000 Islands

Iksan knows the roads around his hometown on the Indonesian island of Sumatra like the back of his hand. He runs a package sorting center from his garage, a small but essential piece of a sprawling network delivering goods bought on Tokopedia, the country’sbiggest homegrown e-commerce company.

His team of three motorcycle riders slog through rice fields and palm oil plantations to bring their neighbors boxes and padded envelopes that were purchased online just days before.

In Indonesia, getting a package from one place to another requires extraordinary logistical planning and often intense physical effort. The nation of 270 million people and 17,000 islands spans a distance as far as Britain to Iran.

Tokopedia spent millions of dollars and more than a decade building a complex web of drivers, warehouses and connections with cargo companies. That was a selling point last year when TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, needed a local partner in Indonesia for its TikTok Shop e-commerce feature. It promptly took a stake in Tokopedia.

“Tokopedia knows the local market so well,” said Dewi Rengganis, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, a consulting firm. “TikTok needed this knowledge.”