SingTel’s SaaS business and partnership with Shopify hits rough bumps

Update (13 August): Shopify responds to the story.

Update (14 August): SingTel responds, “The information in the email, which was mistakenly sent to some of our Shopify customers, is incorrect. We apologise for the miscommunication and would like to clarify that the subscription for existing customers remains unchanged at US$59/month.  We are contacting all affected customers to ensure that there is no confusion.”

Shopify is making a concerted push into Asia-Pacific, most recently organizing a meetup and partnering with Singapore’s largest telco SingTel to resell its e-commerce products in the region.

The partnership would allow merchants from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and India to transact in local currencies by September this year.  They would also get a streamlined order fulfillment process, attractive shipping rates, and 24/7 local hotline technical support.

But it’s not all smooth sailing for the telco. Last week, merchants received an email from SingTel informing them that the “promotional rate of USD 59 no longer applies”. This has confused customers.

Lianne Ong, who runs online jewelry store Pinwheel Jewels, describes SingTel’s email as “high-handed” and “poorly worded”. She said that the email did not explain why things were changing, nor was there reassurance about how SingTel, now the official reseller, would serve customers with the same customer support that Shopify provided.

“Instead, all we got was a high-handed email telling us that the rules were changing and we had no choice but to suck it up.”

She was also unhappy that the email, sent out on 30 July, seemed to communicate that merchants only had one day to sign up in order to receive the promotional pricing. Also, the new announcement, which supposedly made users sign up for a whole year just to get a good rate, “goes against the approach that Shopify has”.

Brennan Loh, head of business development at Shopify, replied her email in less than eight hours, making clarifications and promises of correction:

What happened: A month ago we initiated a pricing change for Shopify subscription tiers. One of the updates was changing the price of our professional plan to $79USD/month. Any time we change pricing for the Shopify service it is meant for new signs only – existing merchant plans will always be honoured (we would never try and ‘surprise’ our customers by changing their pricing without their knowledge).

What we are going to do about it: Evidently this was misinterpreted by one of our partners and for that I apologize. We have since communicated with our partner and all of their staff to ensure this is fully understood across the group representing the Shopify brand.

This was followed by a call from a senior marketing manager from SingTel, which Lianne described as “deeply apologetic”. The staff explained that the email was meant to target only new customers and that existing customers should not have received it.

According to Lianne, the SingTel manager told her that to pressure new customers into a year-long contract is not Shopify’s business proposition and what the telco did was very unreasonable. She even said that she would be angry too if she had received such an email.