A cushy job at Ebay wasn’t enough to prevent this entrepreneur from launching his own company

Ali Aziz, founder and CEO of ecommerce solutions startup Shopistan, was first exposed to online businesses while writing his senior year undergraduate thesis, which investigated the future of VoIP services. This was in the year 2001, when the world had not yet fully woken up to the disruptive potential of the internet. For Aziz, however, what he had learned was enough to resist the temptation of entering a traditional career track. He went out of his comfort zone by moving to Europe, accepting a job at a startup located in Brussels, and spending an “enriching and rewarding” three years at the firm.

It was around this time that Amazon had started to emerge as a serious ecommerce player, redefining the boundaries of traditional commerce. Aziz was intrigued and wanted to immerse himself in this world. He successfully applied for a software engineering job at Amazon and relocated to Arizona, where he spent two years at the ecommerce giant.

“My time at Amazon was essentially a doctoral thesis,” Aziz tells Tech in Asia. “We learned how to leverage online marketing channels, scale businesses, and function as a tech bootcamp.”

Aziz’s time at Amazon was cut short due to a family tragedy, which forced him to move back to Pakistan. However, he increased his skills repertoire by working in a sales-oriented role at Oracle. This allowed him to better understand client needs and the shifting trends of web businesses in the region. Within a year, he was offered a position at eBay.

Shopistan founder Ali Aziz (left), with his family

The entrepreneur reveals that it was a combination of his sales and engineering experience that helped him get the job. eBay was launching a new ‘enterprise sales’ team, which Aziz was chosen to be part of. “The idea was to get offline high-street retailers to come and sell on eBay.”

Based out of London, Aziz worked tirelessly to convince offline retailers to come online through eBay. This often included creating elaborate marketing presentations, and concerted negotiations to convince people who were accustomed to running their business in their own way. Retrospectively, this experience would prove to be invaluable for him as an entrepreneur.

Aziz’s role at eBay expanded to also cover internet marketing strategy for Europe. This helped him to dig his heels deeper in the industry and work on strengthening ecommerce solutions. “We learned a number of new technologies, infused them with digital marketing, and learnt how to innovate,” he says.

Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug

By 2012, Aziz had spent almost a decade working as an employee in the web services industry, and yearned for change. Ecommerce growth in Asia was exploding, best exemplified by the Indian market. Even his native country of Pakistan had begun to start showing signs of potential and he was eager to capitalize on this new opportunity. Later that year, he moved back and established Shopistan.

The idea was to replicate what I was doing at eBay – convincing large offline retailers to invest in online channels and help them manage this aspect of the business. I wanted to use my experience at Amazon and Ebay and help retailers understand that there was considerable opportunity in this space.

Currently Shopistan counts thirty large enterprise retailers spread across several verticals as the majority of their client base. The company is essentially a managed ecommerce services provider and functions by managing all marketing, search, and back-end support for a retailer’s online shop. Aziz reveals that they have also managed to differentiate themselves from the competition by building a unique technology solution.