Shopify has new partners in China and Southeast Asia

Shopify is about to make a big impact in Southeast Asia and China with its new partners. In Southeast Asia, the Canadian e-Commerce giant has made aCommerce its first Shopify Plus partner in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

The partnership will enable brands in the region to have a reliable, flexible, quick launch, and scaling of e-commerce business. They will be able to go direct-to-consumer with their own sales channel, faster than any enterprise platform.

Shopify Plus provides a fast-to-market and cost-effective platform that enables more brands to activate their D2C (Direct-To-Consumer Retail) strategy with equally competitive features as other more complex platforms. aCommerce will leverage Shopify Plus’ world-class product set, scalability, and support to meet the needs of current customers and merchants who are growing rapidly in Southeast Asia.

aCommerce, as the leading end-to-end e-commerce platform and solutions provider, believes that this unique partnership in Southeast Asia will provide a better experience for both brands and customers who shop online. aCommerce will combine its extensive market knowledge, development expertise, and channel operations capabilities, with the powerful automation, promotional tools, exclusive API endpoints offered by Shopify Plus to give brands everything they need to supercharge their D2C channel.

According to Tom Srivorakul, Group Head Of Business Development at aCommerce, having a Direct To Consumer initiative will give brands more control over customer engagement, enable loyalty programs, optimize margins, and ownership of all data.

“aCommerce clients who are adding this Direct To Consumer channel to their existing Marketplaces and Social Commerce will benefit from a unified view of all their e-commerce channels while optimizing their merchandising, marketing, and supply chain,” he added.

For Neel Bhatt, Head of Partnerships for SEA at Shopify Plus, they are confident that aCommerce will be able to help Indonesian, Thai, and Filipino brands leverage all that Shopify Plus has to offer to accelerate their future growth.

Shopify partners JD.com in China

Apart from expanding its business in Southeast Asia, Shopify also partners China’s JD.com to enable merchants in the US to sell to JD’s customers in China.

China is home to the world’s largest e-Commerce market, estimated to be worth $3.3 trillion by 2025, which is also more than five times larger than the US e-Commerce market. In fact, over half (52%) of all retail sales in China in 2021 were predicted to come from e-Commerce alone.

Despite this enormous potential, China has often remained inaccessible to independent businesses and upstart entrepreneurs abroad. Regulatory and logistical barriers, as well as complexities related to pricing, duties, and translations, can be daunting to deal with for all but the largest of brands.

The Shopify and JD.com partnership will unlock the world’s largest e-Commerce market for merchants by giving them access to one of China’s leading e-Commerce marketplaces. By letting merchants easily list their products on JD’s cross-border e-Commerce platform JD Worldwide, this new sales channel opens access to JD’s 550 million active customers in China who are shopping for authentic, high-quality products from brands all over the world.

Compared to the 12 months typically required for foreign brands to begin selling in China, JD’s streamlined channel, JD Marketplace, will allow Shopify merchants in the US to get started in as quickly as three to four weeks. To support merchants in their effort to begin selling into China, the channel will provide:

• Expedited onboarding to help merchants sell quickly
• Logistics that handle end-to-end fulfillment from JD’s US warehouses directly to consumers in China, leveraging JD.com’s China-US cargo flights, 1,300+ warehouses, and 200,000+ delivery personnel in China
• Smart price conversion to local currency based on foreign exchange rates, typical category pricing, as well as VAT and Consumption Tax
• Intelligent translation of product names and descriptions

Daniel Tan, President of JD Worldwide believes the partnership will unlock the huge potential of the Chinese market for brands outside of China. At the same time, it will increase cross-border commerce by leveraging JD’s global supply chain abilities, simplifying what has traditionally been a very complicated process.

As Aaron Brown, Vice President at Shopify puts it, “the future of commerce is commerce everywhere—and that starts by removing barriers to entry to one of the most important e-Commerce markets in the world.”

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