Shopline nets $1.2M in funding from Ardent Capital and 500 Startups, sets sights on Southeast Asia

Shopline co-founders Raymond Yip, Fiona Lau, and Tony Wang (left to right).

Shopline, the Hong Kong-based startup that offers online tools for e-commerce vendors, is announcing it has closed a US$1.2 million seed funding round. Investors include 500 Startups, Ardent Capital, SXE Ventures, East Ventures, and COENT Venture Partners.

Co-founder and CEO Raymond Yip says Shopline will use the funding to ramp up staffing and marketing. Once a team of three, the company has now increased its employee count to nine, and expects to get bigger as it targets expansion in Southeast Asia.

“We just started hiring a month or two ago. It’s definitely a big change for us, because the three of us were not getting paid for a time,” says Yip.

Shopline is an online platform that helps e-commerce merchants sell goods directly to consumers on standalone websites, as opposed to an eBay-esque marketplace. Similar to Shopify, the Ottowa-based startup that’s reportedly valued at over US$1 billion dollars, Shopline charges vendors a monthly subscription fee of HK$125 (about US$16) for access to a domain name and a customizable admin panel.

But whereas Shopify has entered Southeast Asia through a partnership with Singtel, Shopline launched specifically for Hong Kong and Taiwan – two markets its founders believe were underserved. To date, the company claims to have more than 15,000 merchants on its platform, 60 percent of which have roots in Taiwan, while the rest are from Hong Kong. That’s a huge jump from the 4,000 merchants it reported back in August.

Localization has been a key factor driving Shopline’s growth. In Taiwan, for example, vendors have the option to ship goods directly to convenience stores – a standard practice for the island’s ecommerce industry.

“You have to understand the cultural part,” Shopline co-founder Fiona Lau tells Tech in Asia. “If people want to pick up at 7-11, there’s different things you need to fill in – the store name, store code, and another type of store code. If you didn’t know that this was such a big deal and just put the address of the store, it wouldn’t work.”

Taiwan’s ecommerce market generated revenues of US$25 billion in 2013, according to data cited by the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei. The island’s robust logistics network, bolstered by ubiquitous convenience stores, help make same-day delivery commonplace. Yip says that Hong Kong’s ecommerce industry lags behind that of Taiwan due to its smaller population and dense brick-and-mortar landscape.

“[In Hong Kong] when people think of ecommerce, they think of Taobao to buy things from the mainland because it’s cheap. But when it comes to buying normal things like a shirt, you wouldn’t really go to Zara.com you’d just go to Zara because it’s across the street. Whereas in Taiwan, geographically it’s bigger, so there’s more of a need, and it’s a little more mature.”

Lining up Southeast Asia

Shopline’s latest round stands out in particular due to Ardent Capital’s participation. The Bangkok-based venture capital firm invests almost exclusively in Southeast Asia ecommerce plays. Its management team also directly oversees aCommerce, a portfolio company that provides back-end logistics and services for ecommerce companies across the region.

Back in November, aCommerce’s Paul Srivokal told Tech in Asia that the store-in-a-box model might not be suited to Southeast Asia, as ecommerce remains in the early stages and merchants will hesitate to pay for traffic. That might make Ardent bet on Shopline might therefore seem counterintuitive. But Yip says that his team’s proven record in Hong Kong in Taiwan shows that Shopline can execute once merchant preferences evolve.