E-commerce software provider Shopline is looking to turbo charge in the U.S., teaming up with Amazon to give its merchants access to new fulfillment options through Buy With Prime.
Shopline merchants using the Buy With Prime service can either ship to Amazon fulfillment centers or use their existing Fulfilled by Amazon inventory to bridge the last mile between seller and shopper. The new relationship will also allow Shopline merchants to use Amazon-powered checkout even if the company is not currently an Amazon seller.
Christopher Yang, copresident of Shopline, said the addition of Buy With Prime not only helps merchants elevate their e-commerce offering, but connects them with members of Amazon’s mammoth Prime user base.
By pushing into the U.S. market and linking with Amazon, Shopline is squaring off with Shopify, which also offers a Buy With Prime option and has a large merchant base.
But Yang stressed how “very, very focused” Shopline is.
“We actually built all the essentials, the 20 percent of apps that are necessary to run your business,” he said. “And really when we say your business, we’re not going to be a general purpose e-commerce platform. We built toward fashion, we’re built toward health and beauty. So we give you the five [to] 10 apps that you need in fashion.”
For instance, he said that fashion has a “very high return rate” online.
“A lot of it is really due to incorrect sizing,” he said. “So we build that into our solution to help you reduce your return rate.”
The deal with Amazon is a big step for Shopline, which was founded nearly 12 years ago in Hong Kong, but is now based in Singapore.
The company has some 600,000 merchants selling into a variety of markets including Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the U.K., Australia and, more recently, the U.S.
“Because we’re an international company, we focus so much on global selling as one of our key differentiations,” Yang said. “This is very helpful when you have an international product and you don’t want to set up your logistics and fulfill immediately in the U.S. You could easily test a product with a much more diverse channel, and then you could actually build a DTC side and plug into social and see how things convert.”
