With $1.5 Billion in Products To Be Sold This Year, Shopify Gets Serious in Asia

Shopify is one of the world’s largest e-commerce solutions that helps retailers set up their e-stores and sell products online. Today it is powering over 60,000 active stores that have sold over four million products online and is expected to hit $1.5 billion in transactions this year.

To get things started in Asia, Shopify has recently partnered with SingTel, the largest telco in Southeast Asia, as its distribution partner. With the SingTel partnership, Shopify is apparently feeling gung ho about its growth in Asia. Harley Finkelstein, chief platform officer at Shopify explained over email that this is a perfect match between two companies:

Singtel is the leading provider of services to small and medium sized businesses in Asia. Shopify is the leading provider of software to power online shops and businesses globally. Together we believe that we can help anyone with a product, service, or even an idea, to create a beautiful, scalable and successful online business.

With SingTel as its exclusive reseller, Shopify looks to seek growth in Singapore, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia where SingTel has reach. In fact, Shopify is already powering thousands of e-stores in Asia, including By Invite Only and Flesh Imp.

There are a couple of advantages for retailers using Shopify. Some of my friends who are on Shopify say it is easy to customize the site design to provide a unique look and feel. There is even a design theme store available for quick design solutions. For any other functions like referral marketing or inventory management, there is an app store for Shopify users to consider from. Plus, Shopify users do not need to worry about server issues as it is handled by the Shopify team. The retailers can thus focus on what really matters: Selling.

While Shopify does have a good brand in Asia, it faces competition from similar services like Bigcommerce, Magento, Volusion. It also faces competition from other e-store options like classified site like Craigslist and Tokobagus, C2C marketplace like eBay and Tokopedia, and B2B2C sites like Flipkart and Zalora.

Owners of mom and pop shops (or anyone with limited knowledge about e-commerce) are usually the people who looking for a plug-and-play solution when setting up e-stores. But most of the time, I think the decision makers aren’t the shop owners themselves. Rather, they are usually their web developers or consultant friends who will recommend the right platform, which could be Shopify, Bigcommerce or even WordPress.

Compared to the West, e-commerce is still relatively young in countries like India and Indonesia with fewer people shopping online. With Shopify looking serious in Asia, it could only be good for this part of the world as it aims to bring more offline retailers online and in the process, boosting e-commerce activities in Asia, which looks aligned with Shopify’s mission. According to Harley:

Eight years ago Shopify set out to help every small medium enterprise (SMBs) build incredible online businesses. […] Shopify has ambitions to help SMBs in Asia sell anything, anywhere, and at any time – online, offline, and mobile,”