You earn about 3% selling the shampoo. The shampoo supplier will pay you more than that just to reach the people who buy it.

Your costs climbed this year while Jakarta’s minimum wage rose 6.17% and shoppers traded down to smaller packs. To hold volume you ran more promotions, and each one cost you margin on every unit.

Grocery retailers typically keep between 2 and 5 cents of every dollar they ring up. So when the P&L tightens, most marketing teams get handed one instruction: run another promotion, which cuts the margin further.

Meanwhile the suppliers on your shelves spent 642 million dollars last year buying access to shoppers (GroupM, 2025). Tokopedia, Shopee and TikTok Shop collected much of it, and none of them stocks a shelf.

Tokopedia earned Rp533 billion last year from something you give away for free.

That is Tokopedia’s FY2025 advertising revenue. In a single quarter the line grew 45%, and the company credited more ad inventory and sharper targeting (GoTo, 2025).

A supplier does not buy a banner there. It buys three lists: shoppers who searched for shampoo, shoppers who bought a rival last month, and shoppers who left one in a cart. Then it gets a report showing what each group did next.

Your tills record the same behaviour. Roughly 93% of purchase decisions happen inside a store (ShopComm Indonesia), and every one of those decisions ends at your checkout. The supplier cannot buy that record from you today, because no one has assembled it into something sellable.

When you sell an end-cap, you charge for two weeks of floor space in a set number of stores. When Tokopedia sells the same supplier a campaign, it charges for a defined group of shoppers and reports what that group bought afterwards.

Ranch Market sells its suppliers the screens and the shopper list together.

PT Supra Boga Lestari, the company behind Ranch Market and Farmers Market, sells its suppliers in-store screen placement tied to its own loyalty members. Its Chief Merchandising and Marketing Officer put the change simply.

“Brands can advertise not just via the gondola, but also use the screens available in our stores.”

Maria Suwarni · Chief Merchandising & Marketing Officer, PT Supra Boga Lestari

A chain with a few dozen stores did that, without 20,000 outlets. What it needed was the loyalty ID captured at checkout, so a member scanning at the till links to what the screens showed and to what the receipt records.

Every large chain in Indonesia has more shoppers than Ranch Market. Almost none of them sell what Ranch Market sells.

Three lists you can already build from last month’s receipts.

Each one is a query against transactions you already recorded last month. The work is joining the records, not collecting new ones.

01 · The rival’s customers

Every member who bought the competing brand in the last 60 days.

The supplier cannot build this list from its own records, because it never sees who bought the competitor. Send those members one voucher, then report how many switched and what they spent.

02 · The week they run out

Every member who bought a 60ml serum seven weeks ago.

If a bottle lasts her roughly two months, week seven is when she decides whether to repurchase or switch. Your receipt carries the exact purchase date, so you can time the reminder to it.

03 · The ones who trade up

Every member whose basket already carries an imported item.

A supplier launching a premium line does not want reach across your whole chain. It wants only the members who already buy the expensive version, and your purchase history identifies exactly who they are.

One thing you can do on Monday.

Pick your single biggest supplier. Add up what they paid you last quarter for end-caps, gondola strips, sampling and display.

Now ask their category manager what that same supplier spent on Tokopedia over the same quarter. If the second number is larger, they are paying more for a list of shoppers than for space in the store those shoppers walk into.

Thanks for reading this far. Your suppliers hold a retail media budget, and the 642 million dollar figure shows where it currently lands. The question is whether the chain serving those shoppers can compete for it.