What is Digital Marketplace

Indonesia has a large population and its increasing degree of internet penetration accessed through smartphones, which recently has reached 63.5% or more than 170 million people connected to the internet, has made Indonesia a fertile land for digital marketplace platforms to flourish. We witnessed the blossoming of digital marketplace platforms in this decade; many start-ups have been born, and some of them have reached the unicorn status in a relatively short time, such as Go-Jek, Traveloka, Tokopedia, and Bukalapak. Although most of these digital marketplaces have never been physically involved with any types of agriculture, there are more than a dozen start-ups of the digital marketplace that are directly involved with farming, and the number of them has grown recently. This chapter will discuss small-scale farming problems in Indonesia and how the digital marketplace offers solutions to the problems. Related theories such as transaction cost economy and the multi-sided market will be discussed. Some cases of a digital marketplace for agriculture in Indonesia will be explored.