Partner Spotlight: How Shoplazza is Powering a Global E-commerce Experience
Award-winning shopping cart SaaS company (and Shippo partner!) Shoplazza provides an all-in-one solution for brands of all shapes and sizes looking to start, market, and manage their online stores. Powered by advanced technology, the platform is reliable, scalable, and adaptable to ensure a headless commerce experience for merchants.
We recently sat down with the Shoplazza team to learn more about their founding story, what sets them apart from the competition, and what they see as the biggest opportunities for e-commerce merchants today.
Shoplazza’s Founding Story
Since the mid-90s and the primary launch of Amazon as an e-commerce site for purchasing books, more and more people have started doing business online. And in 1998, PayPal made its appearance on the e-commerce stage as a money transfer tool. In 2000, Google Adwords was introduced as a way for e-commerce businesses to advertise to people using Google search. We can see from here that monetization of online traffic created an e-commerce opportunity as well.
In recent years, branded online stores have become more and more popular across the world. Compared with third-party platforms, our online stores are more independent and can acquire customers through primary data analysis, accumulate high-quality private traffic, and raise brand loyalty. Per Shoplazza’s founding team, the DTC (direct to consumer) model through online stores is a big trend, and ample opportunity exists here. In addition, all founding members have solid experience in the monetization of overseas traffic, thus they decided to step into the cross-border SaaS industry. Facts have proved the original decision was correct. It is in their belief that no barrier shall stand between a merchant and his consumers, no matter where the merchant is.
Since its establishment in 2017, Shoplazza has always applied PLG (Product Led Growth) as the core growth factor, mainly for small and medium-sized merchants, helping them to adopt the DTC model with branding strategies and refined operation, and allow them to enjoy the advanced technology, product, and services at a lower cost.
Delivering a Simplified E-commerce Experience for Merchants
Shoplazza breaks down e-commerce into digestible bits so that anyone can figure it out!
If you already have a website or use an e-commerce platform for business, you can migrate your store to Shoplazza with zero hassle. The steps required to migrate to Shoplazza depend on how your store is set up.
If you’re new to e-commerce, our Community section has everything you need to build an online business from scratch.
Even if you have no idea what you want to sell, we can help you out. We partner with industry leaders in product sourcing that offer hassle-free market research and sourcing options. Once you sign up for an account, you’ll be able to access our free app store and find the solutions you need.
Once you’re ready to sell, social media, email and website marketing and branding tools are available directly through our dashboard to help you plan, launch, monitor, and track the results of your ad campaigns with real-time accuracy. For instance, our dashboard is directly integrated with TikTok for Business and Facebook Business, so you can also easily track your ad performance using customizable Facebook and TikTok Pixels.
And when your orders start pouring in, you’ll be able to avail yourself to our payment and fulfillment solutions, which cover over 150 countries around the world. Stripe and PayPal are just some of the major payment options available through SHOPLAZZA!
And if you have trouble figuring out anything at all, our customer support is always available to help you out!
How the Shoplazza Experience Sets Itself Apart
Shoplazza is tailor made for our users. We built our platform and, quite literally, developed the online tools to specifically address the business needs of our 360,000+ vendors. There’s a reason why in APAC, we were able to become the #1 choice for SMEs, as well as international brands, in just 4 years. Currently, Shoplazza is working on expanding our developer and partner ecosystem, so that new tools and store templates are constantly available to meet new market needs.
We saw ourselves as a community project in the early days and we continue to see ourselves in this way even as we grow exponentially. The only difference is that now we have way more partners and external developers to support the way we respond to our user needs. We got to where we are with the help of our users, and we continue to see our diverse user base as a competitive advantage that will continue to drive our growth. We promise to be as available as we were in the early days, if not more, since our client support facilities have been simultaneously built up to match our growth. Our live chat support specialists draw from the expertise of our e-commerce consultants and they’re able to not only resolve issues that vendors may have with functionality, but also give strategic guidance to grow their businesses.
The Biggest Challenges and Opportunities for Merchants This Year
It’s no secret that the growth in online shopping and changes in purchasing habits have been shaped by global events in the past few years. Pricing was the main factor in deciding whether or not to make a purchase at the beginning of the pandemic, but as online shopping has gone mainstream, there is now greater emphasis on quality and brand recognition. And the ideal price tends to be what your customers consider reasonable, rather than incredibly low prices which suggest less than desirable product quality. The greatest challenge for online businesses moving forward is to develop their operations on multiple fronts, including building up their brands on social media, ensuring product quality and availability through reliable supply chains and fulfillment partners, and then being able to follow up with round-the-clock support, giving their customers a shopping experience leads to repurchases, and, hopefully, customer retention, which is increasingly important as competition in the e-commerce space grows.
As for opportunities, the demand for customized shopping and omni-channel shopping is rapidly growing. Customization applies to both products and online shopping experiences, the latter is easier to implement for most businesses. You can start by analyzing your customers’ online journey before making changes to your online store that optimize their shopping experience. Omni-channel shopping is also doable for most businesses – the main idea is to make your products as available as possible, insofar as online channels, headless commerce is the prevailing trend (i.e. making your products shoppable from any interface). If possible, it would also be a good idea to make some of your products available offline, be it through pop-up shops or partnerships with traditional retailers.
Shoplazza’s Advice for Merchants Looking to Expand Globally
Branding is as important as marketing and supply chain logistics. The world is a big place – you’re not only competing with local or regional businesses in your niche, you’re dealing with global leaders and innovators with experience in servicing customers that may have very different needs and shopping habits than what you’re used to.
To succeed in this space, your brand identity is crucial as it will allow global consumers to resonate with the product or service you’re offering in a sea of similar brands. Building a brand is like weaving a tapestry in that different aspects of your business come together to define who you are for an audience, and the more you’re able to make your business function organically, the better you’ll be able to capture a global audience.
Lastly, shipping will make or break an international business, so be sure to work with multiple shipping partners when you invest in global expansion.
Needless to say, branding, marketing, supply chain solutions are our bread and butter at Shoplazza, be sure to check out Shoplazza community if you’re interested in learning more!
Shoplazza, an award-winning Shopping Cart SaaS company, provides an all-in-one solution for brands of all shapes and sizes to start, market, and manage their online stores. The platform is powered by advanced technology, and reliable, scalable, and adaptable to ensure a headless commerce experience for our merchants.
Shoplazza values developers and is committed to leveraging the value of the global developers ecosystem in helping merchants achieve global business success.
