Covid-19 has accelerated the adoption of online shopping, with website traffic increasing by 35% in Singapore. According to Shopline, the retail sector saw a deep plunge in sales revenue in 2020 — 52.1% to be exact.
As a “smart commerce enabler”, Shopline offers three main services: plug-and-play websites for businesses, social commerce solutions and an all-in-one point-of-sale (POS) system.
Founded in Hong Kong in 2013 with a three-man team, Shopline was accepted into the Silicon Valley-based 500 Startups accelerator in 2014.
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Since then, the company has expanded rapidly to hundreds of staff regionally in Asia, with offices in eight regions, including Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam. The company entered Singapore in September 2020.
To date, Shopline has helped over 250,000 merchants open their online stores, including well-known brands such as Durex, Bee Cheng Hiang and Pan Ocean Seafood.
But with a core product of building and hosting web stores for clients, how different is Shopline from other global plug-and-play services like Wix and Shopify?
According to Jeff Lim, general manager at Shopline Singapore, the human touch is crucial in helping SMEs in Singapore. “We work with SMEs very closely; we do understand the different nuances and pain points, and we build these features for them,” says Lim in an interview with The Edge Singapore.
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“When they come to us, we provide them with cross-border capabilities and infrastructure. Basically, we provide them with logistics, payments, the ability to make cross-border sales, or even innovate in promotion tools, CRM [customer relationship management] tools and digital marketing tools for them to succeed in the webstore,” Lim adds.
Prior to joining Shopline, Lim spent a year and a half as managing director at Rocket Internet. On the e-commerce front, Lim cut his teeth at Lazada, serving as head of vendor incubation and management, where he encountered firsthand the challenges that online retailers face.
Lim: [Retailers looking to go online] want to succeed but they don’t have the resources to do so. It’s not just money, but it’s also knowledge and the economic tools to do well online.
“I was dealing with 80% of all Lazada’s vendors [then], a few thousand merchants. They want to succeed but they don’t have the resources to do so. It’s not just money, but it’s also knowledge and the economic tools to do well online,” he says.
To meet these needs, Lim considers Shopline to be an aggregator of tools for small businesses. “SMEs do not have the economies of scale when talking to delivery partners or payment providers. They will never get the best rates; with off-the-shelf services, they are paying a premium. At Shopline, we see that as an opportunity to negotiate really good rates with third-party logistics and payments partners, bring down costs and pass the savings on to SMEs.”
For example, the best market rates charged by local payments gateways vary around 3.4% to 3.9%, says Lim. With Shopline Payments, businesses pay just 2.99% for payments services.
“The whole objective of this e-commerce is to build a closed ecosystem for our merchants, so they know they can get everything that they want from a one-stop solution for their webstores,” says Lim.
At home, mom-and-pop shops may face greater challenges in migrating online. Singapore’s Heartlands Go Digital programme, for example, aims to provide 20,000 heartland shops with steps to go digital. As of February, over 85% of these businesses have received guidance on adopting e-payment and digital commerce from five partners: Carousell, Fave, Grab, NETS and Shopee.
Lim believes the biggest obstacles for such businesses are a lack of knowledge and time, and many business owners simply do not have the capacity to keep up with trends. “As we progress, everything becomes a lot more fragmented... They’re looking at a lot of different channels: physical retail, digital marketplaces and now, online sales. That’s why we are coming in to put all these back into one solution — one dashboard — again.”
Now that the transition to e-commerce has gained momentum, Lim says it is not difficult to get retailers on board. “It’s the Singaporean mentality; they don’t want to be the first to do something.”
Seafood and the pandemic
Over the course of Covid-19 and subsequent lockdowns, Shopline saw 300% growth in terms of revenue. Social commerce, in particular, makes up “a good 30%” of total sales, says Lim.
Social commerce, which includes livestream sales, is thriving in Singapore, says Lim, making up half of Shopline’s sales in this market.
The burgeoning field made a social media star out of local getai singer Wang Lei. When Singapore entered its “circuit breaker” last April, the 60-year-old began hawking seafood on often expletive-filled Facebook livestreams. Last year, the entertainer revealed that he made two to three times more per hour from livestreams than singing at a live show.
Many aspiring entrepreneurs are eyeing the sector, says Lim, with conversion rates for sales much higher, at around 7% to 8%, compared to the typical e-commerce webstore rate of about 2%. “It’s obviously because of the engagement that a livestreamer or host has with the consumers that increases their propensity to spend. More often than not, it’s like an impulse purchase.”
However, inefficiencies in the process make social commerce ripe for disruption. “Traditionally, the livestream host asks the audience to leave a comment if they are interested in purchasing the featured item. At the end of each livestream, the merchant will contact the users. It’s a big pain point because merchants need to do the reconciliation manually,” says Lim.
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“With Shopline’s tools, a customer who types a defined comment, like ‘+1’, will receive a shopping cart notification via Facebook Messenger,” Lim adds.
Looking ahead, Singapore’s appetite for social commerce will expand beyond seafood, says Lim. “The category that drives the largest revenue is actually electronics, obviously, because I think the average order value itself is a lot higher. But for Asia and Southeast Asia, in particular, I think one of the biggest categories is fashion.”
“Fashion and F&B expect double-digit growth in the next two to three years. There’s an opening up to more manufacturers going upstream these days, especially in countries like Thailand, Vietnam, or even Indonesia,” notes Lim.
Photos: Albert Chua/The Edge Singapore
